You are here: Home / Archives for 10x

Everything You Need to Know About Startups, You Can Learn From Mythbusters

March 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I’m in the midst of another startup, with three friends, and we’re having a great time.  I realized last night how perfectly you can prepare for one of these adventures by studying one of my favorite TV shows, Mythbusters.  If you don’t know it, then you should probably stop reading and go watch an episode.

“I reject your reality and substitute my own” – Adam

The core of every startup I’ve done is an overmastering conviction that you are doing something deeply important and new – that you have stumbled on an insight that nobody else understands as deeply and powerfully as you do.  You gather around you a small band of people with a similar conviction to pursue your crazy dream together.  Your day is not full of reviews and alignment meetings and sync-ups and constrained by “the way we do things here”.  You do them any damn way you please, and nobody around you is a naysayer.  Naysayers are not welcome and do not flourish in startups.  Only obsessive true believers, please.

“They don’t just tell the myths, they put them to the test” – Narrator

The danger, of course, is that you might all be wrong.   Startups are highly prone to groupthink.  The brilliant vision you are chasing with all your heart and soul might not be something anyone wants.  To quote another sage, John Maynard Keynes has a great line about this: “It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone.”

So, you have to mix in a ruthless focus on testing your ideas with customers.  This is the heart of the Lean Startup methodology, which I love and which we are using at Highspot.  You build something as quickly as possible that lets you evaluate your beliefs, and then you adapt based on what you find.  Just like the Mythbusters crew is constantly trying ideas, having their approach fail, and trying again and again, a startup is a succession of attempts to find a model that yields a product people want to use and a way to make money from it.

As Kari says, “I guess we don’t have a Plan B because we kinda expected Plan A to go off without a hitch.”  Adam’s response will resonate with most (successful) entrepreneurs:  “You should never, ever, ever expect Plan A to go off without a hitch. Usually, Jamie and I, it’s Plan D.”  Or in a startup, Plan Z.

And with any luck, you will end up with a conviction that is “Confirmed” and not “Busted”.

“Failure is always an option” – Adam

One of the realities of startup life is that they mostly fail.  Going in, you have to have a crazy passionate belief that you can succeed, but you also know that the odds are not in your favor and you can’t allow yourself to be crushed if it doesn’t work out.  As Kari says, “If we’re wrong about this, we’re going to have a really bad day.”  But you have to embrace that possibility and forge ahead anyway.  I’ve met many people in comfortable big company jobs that talk about doing a startup .. but can’t bring themselves to leave their “gilded cage”.

“We have no idea what we’re doing.” – Grant

Another thing I love about startups and Mythbusters is the perpetual willingness to dive in and just figure something out you have no idea how to do.  You don’t apprentice with the person who has 20 years experience, you don’t go to school and get a degree .. you just dive in and make out the best you can.  And you mess up a lot.  Hence the Facebook mantra that they have tried to maintain to this day – “move fast and break things”.  Most large companies have long since lost that spirit by the time they get big and successful.  In a startup, if it needs to be done, you just do it.  By hook or by crook, the best you can, as quickly as possible, and with energy and passion.

“If I had any dignity, that would have been humiliating” – Adam

If you are concerned about remaining in control and maintaining your dignity, go somewhere else where your needs will be respected.  Like honey badgers , “startups don’t care”.  You do what needs to be done.  But there’s a really great thing about it, too: “It’s funny what gets us excited, isn’t it?” – Jamie.  You will end up getting passionate about really oddball things that you don’t think twice about when other people are doing them for you – setting up your email hosting, picking desks for the office, stocking the frig with supplies.  It’s like parents getting excited and emotional about the minutiae of raising and taking care of the kids.

“You SO wish you were me right now.” – Adam

When it all works, it’s just one of the best feelings in the world.  You dream up some concept, you band together with a group of kindred spirits, and you make magic out of thin air.  As Tory says, “Do ya think I’m excited? You better believe I’m excited. We just built a rubber moose and now we’re gonna crash cars into it. It doesn’t get better than this!”

Filed Under: 10x, 1x Tagged With: ,

What Should Managers Do All Day Long?

March 5, 2012 by 3 Comments

What managers spend their time on is often the source of (frequently cynical) commentary by the people who work for them.  I have found that it is also a source of anxiety for a lot of managers.  They often aren’t quite sure what they should be doing to add the most value.  It becomes even tougher, I’ve found, as you get more senior and have larger organizations to worry about.  You become very detached from the real work that is going on and what you do seems pretty distantly related to anything concrete.

Let’s take an example.  When I was the general manager of a pretty large team (400 people), I had a clear idea what the team needed to do – deliver a high quality next release of the product and grow the business 20% this year.  Great, but since I’m not writing any code or carrying a quota, how do I contribute to those goals?  What do I prioritize Monday afternoon at 3pm to help the team hit its goals?

To keep my sanity, I needed something that was my north star.  I created a document which I called “My Job”, and I reviewed it at least once a week.  It has the activities that I did, not the goals of the team.  For example, the first one is “Inspire” – I want to inspire the people on the team with a vision of where we are headed and why it is important and convince them that it is within reach.  Another is “Drive Rhythms” – for a team at scale, you have to have efficient rhythms to review the state of the business, check in with the engineering team each milestone, manage budgets, etc.

I scheduled an hour every Monday morning to plan the week, and one of the most important things I did was to take the “My Job” page and walk through these four steps:

1.  What’s F-ed up?

For each activity, I asked myself the question, “what’s f-ed up?”  And if I felt ambitious, “how can I move this forward proactively?”  This was an opportunity to dump all the hopes and anxieties buzzing around in my head down on paper.  The key thing was not to hold back – I wanted to get it all out.  And I wanted to make myself think about each activity in case it needed more attention than I was giving it.

2.  What can be done about it?

Next, I went back through the list to figure out what could be done about everything I had written down.  I needed to be in a very different state of mind – to go from a free-flowing brainstorm to focusing on concrete steps I could take.  I’ve found that it can be hard to switch back and forth quickly – once I’m being detailed and practical, the ideas don’t flow as freely.  So that’s why I do the whole second column first, then go back and do the third.  The things in the third column are very straight-forward and doable (“next actions” in Getting Things Done lingo).  These are specific actions I can do right away.

3.  Should I be the one doing it?

One easy trap to fall into (I am highly prone to this) when you are a manager is to over-function .. to jump in and do work that properly ought to be done by the people who work for you.  It’s like the over-protective parent who does everything for their kids, so they never learn how to do things for themselves.  It’s very annoying for the direct report who wants to solve their own problems.  So before I start firing off emails and diving into all those actions, I look them over to make sure that I’m the right person to do them.

4. Am I doing the really important “only I” things?

One of my favorite questions on this front comes from Peter Drucker, who was one of the people who basically invented management theory.  He wrote many useful books (try “The Essential Drucker” if you are interested – it’s a good survey of his ideas across a variety of topics).   And he challenges managers to ask themselves a very important question: “What can I, and only I, do, that, if done well, would have the most impact on the organization?”  This is a great question to ask yourself.  I suspect that every action item you identified is a useful thing to do, and will be of some value for the team.  So the question shouldn’t be “what adds value?”  Most or all of them will, hopefully, if you have a clue.  The question is, “what adds the most value that nobody else can do?”  Make sure you do those, before you fritter away all your time doing random things that aren’t going to have as much impact or that somebody else can do equally well.

Once I’ve gone through this exercise, I really feel like I have a handle on what I am worried about, what I should be worried about, what I could do about it, and what I will do.  This exercise translates high-level goals like “grow the business” into “set up a meeting with Mary to adjust quotas” and turns “ship a high quality release” into “review the latest benchmark numbers on the performance issues with the new version of the database.”   And it (helped) keep me out of the way of the team when they didn’t need me.

Do you have a north star that tells you what your job is?  What tools help you figure it out?

Filed Under: 1000x, 100x, 10x, Managing People Tagged With: , ,

The Sacredness of Ownership

February 24, 2012 by 1 Comment

sa·cred (sā′krid) – secured as by a religious feeling or sense of justice against any defamation, violation, or intrusion; inviolate

The word “sacred” is not one to be used lightly, but I chose it on purpose to talk about a principle I believe is at the heart of any healthy team culture: ownership.  I’ve spent most of my career building large scale software projects, and these are intensely complex systems.  No one person can understand all that complexity and track all the infinite detail of a large-scale project.  And it only takes one person writing a few lines of sloppy code to introduce a security hole that can cause tremendous damage to your customers and to your company.  The success of the whole venture rests on the decisions that the people at the front lines of the team are making every day.  So they’d better feel like they own their work, and they’d better be right!

What It Means to “Own” Something

Does “owning” something mean you get to do whatever you want with it?  No.  In defining ownership, many people focus on making decisions, which is important.  But to me, the most important thing about being an owner is that you are accountable for the success of what you own.  Therefore, the first and most important thing that an owner should do is to define success.  This sounds easy, but it isn’t, and many people do this wrong.  If you are a developer and own a feature, success doesn’t mean that you wrote good code and checked it in.  Success means that the whole feature team understands the feature and why it is needed, you coded it, you nailed the basics like performance and security, it works well, it shipped, and many happy customers are using it to solve real needs that they have.  A good owner defines success in terms of impact, not activity.  They include key stakeholders.  They feel accountable for the whole success, not a narrow part of it.

It is very tempting to define success in terms of what you control.  This is a classic mistake that people make, especially when they are early in their career.  They only feel accountable for the part they fully control.  “But I’m the developer .. isn’t it enough that I write great code that works?”  NO.  The customer does not care if you wrote good code.  The customer cares if you solved their problem.  Shareholders don’t care if you wrote good code.  They care if customers love the product and buy a lot of it.  You need to feel accountable for the whole success, even though you almost certainly don’t control it.  If you did everything right that you control, and the feature fails to be successfully used by many happy customers, then you failed.  The reason this is so important is that people generally try very hard to succeed.  If you define success broadly, you won’t settle for the excuse that “my part works – it was the other bonehead who blew it”.  You’ll go the extra mile, you’ll escalate if somebody else is screwing up and taking the whole ship down.  It doesn’t matter how beautifully you polished the handrail on the Titanic.  You still drowned.

Decision Making and Overlapping Ownership

One thing that’s confusing about ownership is that multiple people can seemingly own the same thing.  For example, the people designing a product and the engineering team that builds it all need to own what they work on.  Doesn’t that violate the whole idea of ownership?  No, if you internalize the accountability model.  All of the groups contributing must feel accountable for the whole success of their work.

Great, but then how do decisions get made?  The answer is that it depends what you are deciding.  For example, the ultimate decision maker about the way to code a feature better be the developer.  But there are other stakeholders – developers might have to do a code review with their lead or a fellow developer.  They might need to follow development guidelines set up by the development manager, so other people can understand the code and it fits in with the rest of the system.  The designer needs the feature to actually meet the user’s needs.  The developer still owns the code and is accountable for its success, but they must honor the (legitimate!) roles of other people in achieving that success.

Stakeholders

Let’s say you are the owner and hence the decision maker.  One of your responsibilities as owner is to understand who else has a stake in the decisions you are making and what their role is.  Sometimes this is obvious, or you can just use intuition and it all works out.  That’s often the case in small teams.  But as you own more important and complicated things and are part of larger organizations, you will run into the limits of the ad hoc approach.  That’s when it becomes useful to think explicitly about the other stakeholders and their roles.

Once upon a time, the Windows team realized that decision-making was a mess – people weren’t sure whom they had to consult, who was the butt on the line for key decisions, etc.  And so things fell through the cracks or there was gridlock, and accountability was lacking.  As a result, they created a role/stakeholder model that has been used with a lot of success at Microsoft (called OARP).  There are industry equivalents (a popular one is called RACI) – which one you pick isn’t that important.  The key thing is to be explicit about the roles in a particular decision and make sure everyone understands what their role is.  Writing this down will often reveal misunderstandings (“what do you mean I don’t get to review the decision before it is finalized??!!!”) and problems (“we have to review this with twenty people before we lock the decision down?  That’s not going to work.”).  In general, the owner’s life and the team’s efficiency will improve radically as you reduce the number of reviewers, approvers, and other obstacles to progress.

Dealing With Misbehaving Stakeholders

Just because you have done a great job defining the ownership model and gotten everyone to understand it and agree to it in theory doesn’t mean that’s actually how things are going to work out.  People will frequently violate their role, often through the best of intentions.  Maybe your lead says you are the owner but they don’t respect your ownership and are always micromanaging you or giving direction to your team without including you in the conversation.  Maybe people elsewhere in the organization who are supposed to review decisions start turning into participants or are making decisions on your behalf.  And so forth – the opportunities for misbehavior are legion.  Sometimes they happen because people are too eager to help, often because people are being thoughtless, and sometimes from malice.

Your responsibility as the owner is to treat these as problems and get them fixed.  That super-helpful senior manager who comes down and straightens things out for you without you asking for help?  Problem.  Either you blew it, or that very helpful manager did, or you both did.  The participant who thinks you are blowing it as an owner and second guesses your decisions without confronting you about it?  Problem.

If someone in your management chain comes in and starts proclaiming this and that, there are two common reactions: 1) denial/rejection/anger and 2) “yes, sir, thank you”.  Both are wrong.  The right response from the owner is “good input, thanks”.  Then YOU go take action.  Don’t ignore what the manager thinks.  Sometimes they are giving you new data, sometimes advice (hopefully good).  Sometimes you are screwing up and they feel a need to jump in.  But if you are going to be a good owner, then you have to get the dynamics right.  You own the decision until ownership is taken away.  That should always be an explicit act – you might ask the manager to take over, they might inform you that they are taking over; that can be the right thing, but it is a very important change in the state of the project.  If ownership is leaving you and going somewhere else, you are no longer accountable for success.  That’s a big deal, and everyone needs to be clear about it.  You don’t have the right to demand to stay on as owner if your manager becomes convinced that you are not up to it.  You do have the right to demand clarity.

Final Thoughts

In my opinion, ownership is a crucial tenet of a healthy team culture.  How to take action on it?

  1. Figure out what you own.  Make sure everyone (including your manager) agrees.
  2. Define success.  Don’t be narrow.
  3. Figure out who the stakeholders are and respect their role.
  4. Go own the hell out of it.  Everyone is depending on you to get it right.
Filed Under: 1000x, 100x, 10x, 1x, Managing People Tagged With: , ,
«Previous Page
%d bloggers like this: