不会带团队的领导，只能自己干到死编者按：Adam Pisoni 曾是 Yammer 的联合创始人，他在本文就如何成为一位优秀的科技公司领导者分享了自己的看法。他的核心观点是：作为公司创始人，你不能什么问题都要自己解决，你要学会打造一个能够解决问题的团队和公司。不会带团队的领导者，只能自己干到死。
仅仅用了 4年 时间，Adam Pisoni 就帮助 Yammer 从一个仅有 5 个人员工的小团队发展成一家员工数超过 500 人、市值数十亿美元的大公司。如今的他再次启航，重新创办了一家目前同样只有几个员工的新公司。这时有个问题一直在他脑海中挥之不去：“这次创业，我想要什么不一样的东西呢？”
作为创业者，你当然希望自己能创办一家伟大的公司，所有员工都能相处融洽，大家都很拼命地工作，也能为公司盈利。然而现实情况是，你会发现自己在很多时候并不是非常信任自己的同事，每天都像疯子一样在公司里跑来跑去，想试图去跟踪了解每一个员工的工作情况。你想通过这种方式确保大家都没有犯错，不过这无形中已经影响了大家的工作效率。而你还在想当然的认为，如果不确保自己时时刻刻都掌控着这一切，整个公司就会乱套。
上面这个现象反映的就是目前大家对如何成为一位出色的公司领导者存在的一个普遍误解。如果你是公司创始人，你很有可能会将自己的全部精力都聚焦在研发优秀的产品上。但很快你就会发现，你需要将自己的思维方式从开发优秀产品转变为打造一个能够开发优秀产品的公司。这是一个很微妙但非常重要的思维转变。如果在公司什么问题都需要你出面解决，你的公司就不可能发展壮大。
不久前，Pisoni 在 First Round CEO 论坛上就公司创始人思维如何从自己开发优秀的产品转变如何打造成一家能如何开发出优秀产品的公司分享了自己的看法，这对创始人和团队负责人都很有借鉴意义。此外，他还分享了创始人如何从日常琐事中抽出身来，从将有限的时间用在最重要的事情上。
康威定律，从琐事中抽出身来
曾经有一段时间，我努力确保每一件小事都不出问题，然而我却发现，在这个过程中我我忽视了很多其它我更应该思考和重视的问题。我当时甚至不知道这些问题的存在，过了很长时间以后才知道。那段时间，尽管我们已经有几十号员工了，但我还是忙得脚不离地，尽最大努力自己多做事。我会参加绝大部分的公司会议，员工遇到不管遇到什么问题都来问我，而我必须要为他们提供解决问题的方案。这种忙其实并非好事。
这里存在一个真正的危险：作为领导者，你可能会为自己的异常忙碌而自我感觉良好，感觉就像自己为公司创造了多少价值一样。其实背后隐藏的是正在快速堆积的层层危机。
那段时间，我没有时间停下来去思考。然而当其中一位工程师向我说起康威定律时，我顿时愣住了，立刻决定花时间对此进行反省。康威定律的大概意思是这样的：“公司开发的产品和服务其实都是公司自身组织架构、沟通与工作方式的反映。” 确实如此，很多时候，我们从产品和服务的架构就能看出公司的组织架构。
在 Yammer 发展初期，我只负责监督一个小的工程师团队开发最初的产品，他们都在代码库里开发，然而随着越来越多工程师的加入，那个代码库变得日益庞大，也愈加难以管理，就像日益庞大的工程师团队本身面临的问题一样。只有当他们将所有工程师分为不同的小组后，他们也得以将庞大的代码库巧妙地分解成不同的小服务。我发现，人员的组织架构是可以改变产品的架构的。
在上个世纪 90年 代，我还是一位 web 开发者，那时还没有任何流程的概念，人们也不重视这一块。工程师只是简单地在网络服务器上编辑活动文件。那时也没有所谓的测试，更没有版本控制。如果放在今天，那样绝对乱套了。现在我们要想让众多工程师在一块高效工作，我们就需要有一个开发方法学。除了适用于工程师的开发方法学外，现在很多公司甚至缺少一个有效的组织方法学：一个不是什么工作都要你亲自来管的情况下依然能确保公司高效运转的系统或流程。
在 Yammer 的时候，我们做的非常正确的一件事是：持续迭代和完善开发方法。随着团队规模的扩大，团队的开发效率反而降低了，这迫使大家不得不思考这样一个问题：“一个团队在黑客马拉松上开发产品的速度为何比平日里开发快那么多？” 大家开始意识到，因为我们平时同时在开发的东西太多，而在开发过程中的沟通效率却又非常低效。大多数时间里，人们需要同时兼顾多个项目。
后来我们制定了一个规则：在一个新项目所需的全部人员没有齐备并可以完全投入到这个项目里之前，我们是不会启动这个项目的。一旦人员齐备，我们会赋予这个新组建的项目团队绝对的自主权和决策权，不需要外部授权审批就能独自把项目做好。一般情况下，一个项目 2-10 周能完成。一个项目完成后，团队就会解散，大家再各自进入其它项目。通过这种方法，公司创始人就不需要凡事亲力亲为。例如，践行上面的规定后，我就不需要亲自过问开发架构或编码规范，他们自己完全可以高效完成。
作为领导者，你的目标是建立一个不再依靠你、甚至不需要你的组织架构和工作流程。
节奏的力量：如何让公司发展富有节奏
如何才能建立这样一个体系：在不需要你监督的情况下，公司各项重大的事务依然能有条不紊的进行。对于这个问题，Pisoni 给出的首要建议是：战斗节奏。
在公司的日常运营中，领导者要做很多工作，也要做很多决策。然而在大部分情况下，所做的工作都是没有任何目的计划性的。对于何时做决策、何时转变战略、何时重新评估，这些都没有任何节奏，也没有充足的理由。所有这些工作如果都能有条不紊、有节奏地进行，你将会节省很多时间，工作效率也会提高很多。节奏有利于加速执行，可以省去很多不必要的会议和监督检查。有几个地方，如果能够做好的话，是有助于快速推动公司发展的，但这些地方也恰恰是很多公司容易出问题的地方。
1. 角色和职责
大部分创业公司看惯了大公司的组织架构和行事作风，就轻而易举地得出这个结论：正是大公司严格的组织架构和各种头衔阻碍了公司的发展步伐。这有一定道理，那一套东西确实在一定程度上阻碍了公司的发展。如果仅凭此就认为清除发展障碍的最佳解决方案就是去除组织架构、也撤了头衔的话，这就错了。这样做反而会更严重地阻碍公司的发展。如果没有清晰的职责定位，公司就会很容易陷入决策瘫痪和争执不休地状态。我自己从来没见过哪个公司在发展到一定程度后依然觉得自己不需要任何组织架构的。
然而，就算没有严格的组织架构和头衔也是可以确保岗位职责定位清晰的，方法就是定位不再依附于头衔或组织架构的清晰的角色与职责。这些角色应该是临时且灵活性的。要想知道公司究竟需要哪些角色，可以通过回想公司过去和想象未来必须要做哪些决策来确定。看公司里哪些问题最常出现，尤其是那些因为找不到责任人而总是需要你和公司其他领导亲自去决策的问题。下面是有关职责定位的两个核心要点：
创建一个定义角色和职责的公开文档，确保公司所有人都能看到。每个角色清单需要包含的信息：角色的重要考核指标，谁担任这个角色，这个角色的职责是什么，这个角色的任期是多久。
作为团队领导者，一定不要随意干预被赋予相应角色的员工，给予他们绝对的控制权。如果做不到这一点，好事也会变成坏事。
做到这些后，同时还要明确所有角色都不是永久的。它只是一个角色，不是一个头衔，也不是固定职位。在 Yammer 的时候，我是公司的 CTO，当时公司还有一个技术副总裁和几位技术主管。当时技术新人的岗位培训和管理这个工作在现有的组织架构和头衔内是没人直接负责的，属于管理漏洞。每当出现这类问题，最后都会推给我。当时我还为自己能快速决策、推动工作而自我感觉良好，但我没意识到，正是这些东西阻碍了我们快速发展的步伐。之所以会出现有的工作没人负责的问题，正是由于角色和职责不清才导致的。
现在回想起来，我真希望自己当时就能做到让公司的每项重要工作都有明确的负责人来负责，同时还能每个月重新评估一次。
Pisoni 建议每个月进行一次角色和职责的评估检查，内容如下：
充当相应角色的所有人都要快速回顾他们在这一角色上所开展的工作。
让大家针对是否需要增加或撤除某些角色提出意见建议，或是对现有角色的职责进行调整或加入新的职责。在某些情况下，有些任务可能以后就不会再出现了，这种情况下就不再需要负责这个任务的角色存在了，需要让他们担任其他角色。
大家提的建议是否采纳，需要通过综合决策（Intergrative Decision Making）流程来决定。让一群人共同决定是否采纳大家的建议，而不是老大说了算。在综合决策流程下，每个人都可以提建议。提了建议之后，会有一轮针对所提建议的问答环节，问答之后，提议者可以对自己的提议进行调整，接着会有最后一轮的答疑环节。这么做是为了避免出现不管什么建议都采纳的情况。
2. 监控进展
我个人是非常讨厌那种所谓的例会和例行状态报告。既然这样，在公司各项业务快速变化的过程中，如果才能保证所有人都知悉公司业务的各项情况并齐心协力并肩作战呢？
作为公司领导者，这时你同样不能走极端。你不需要文山会海，但也不能彻底拜托会议。我后来拜访了 Stanley McChrystal 将军，他曾是美国驻伊拉克和阿富汗军队的最高指挥官。通过这次拜访，让我对会议有了新的认识。
McChrystal 将军在战场所面临的问题可比你们现在处理的任何问题都要大得多：在瞬息万变的战场环境中，数万军队都需要通过他的调度指挥来确保会战场环境有清晰的认识，从而做到齐心协力作战。为此，他创建了这样一个流程：每天都花 90 分钟时间，他所指挥的所有军队都要从世界各地连线进入战场紧急状况通报会议，每个军队小组都有 90 秒的发言时间，说他们已经做了哪些工作、计划开展的工作以及存在的潜在风险和障碍。所有小组发完言后，会有几分钟的时间用来快速答疑。
我建议创业公司的领导每周可以开一次类似的会议。这个会议的目的不是解决问题或是确定谁该做哪些工作。因为一堆人想通过利用有限的会议时间解决问题基本是不现实的。McChrystal 意识到，他每天开 90 分钟的会的真正价值存在于会中和会后的交流沟通中。即使每天开会，要确保每个人都能得到他们所需要的信息还是非常有挑战的。会中，大家都在一个频道上。会后，大家可以相互确认所得知信息的准确性，有问题可以交流。他建议，这类会议可邀请全体员工参加，让它成为真正意义上的跨部门会议。
McChrystal 自己也意识到，他在这类会议中的作用并非是自己亲自解决大家的问题，而是为了让大家有机会能找到可以解决问题的最佳人选。他当然也不认为自己可以解决所有问题或是做好每一个重大决策。他通常将重要的交流沟通放在会后进行。他也鼓励其他人也这么做。
要确保公司里的每个人对公司的各项进展都有实时、清晰的了解，这样他们就知道应该何时加入各个项目并发挥自己的特长。这一点非常非常重要，大家只有对事情了如指掌，各个部门才能更高效地开展工作，而不用什么事都等着高层指示。
3. 学会回顾
通常情况下，创业公司领导者同时只能兼顾很少的几个目标，其中之一就是避免重蹈覆辙。然而，要想确保大家不犯同样的错误，最可靠的方法就是凡事都要亲自过问。这样显然行不通。那该怎么办呢？答案就是要定期回顾。不要每个团队各自回顾，最好能全公司一起回顾总结。任何一个团队，只要在过去一个月完成了一个项目或解决了一个问题，都可以在回顾会议上发言。如果你经常这样做的话，大家发言的内容就可以很笼统，不用什么事都介绍地那么详细。每个项目 5-10 分钟就能说完。
要想将回顾总结做得有效果，不要仅仅回顾过去做了什么工作，还要搞清楚工作是否起到了效果。如果有效果，思考能否做得更好？除此之外，还要弄清现有的工作流程里，哪些有效果、哪些没效果。
在这个过程中，学会使用指标是非常重要的。回顾时，你肯定想看看相关项目的关键指标，这些指标都应该是以结果为导向的。例如，好的指标可能是用户留存率。以结果为导向的指标是那些用户真正关心的东西。
最后，思考今后开展工作将会有哪些改变。要思考这几个问题：我们接下来应该做哪些我们之前没做的事情？现在做的所有事情里面，哪些应该停止？我们应该继续做哪些事情？
4. 制定计划和工作的优先级
很多创业公司的创始人只看眼前、不看长远，不知何时该改变方向或是转变工作的优先级。其中最糟糕的情况是，每次你只和为数不多的几个公司领导关起门来，靠拍屁股做决策，去确定新项目和工作重点，不和大伙沟通。这时公司里的员工会很崩溃，会有种被忽视的感觉。这样他们就无法以同样的激情投入到工作中。你每这样做一次，大家对公司愿景和长期成功的信心就会减少一点。这一点要非常注意。
Pisoni 建议，每个季度至少开一次有关制定公司计划和工作优先级的全天会议。这样的会议有回顾的部分，更多的是未来的计划。我们从上个季度的工作中学到了什么？它们将如何影响我们未来的策略？然后确定整个公司的工作优先级，如这个季度的重点目标是用户增长，那么公司每个人都要朝着这一个目标努力。最后，根据你新确定的工作优先级，决定哪些工作可以停止不做。
其实要让大家停止手头正在做的项目工作是非常困难的，他们已经为此做了很多努力，现在你让他们放弃，大家可能会不舒服甚至不服气，如果你给出的理由不充分的话更会如此。这可能会造成公司内部关系的紧张。
5. 学会缓和公司内部紧张的关系氛围
不管你自己有多出色能干，也不管你的团队如何紧密团结，公司内部总会出现难处理的紧张关系氛围，对此你一定要加以重视。
两周前，Pisoni 和一个小创业公司的创始人聊了聊，对方这样说：“你知道吗，最近我们公司的整个销售部门都非常沮丧，因为他们想让研发部门开发一个能帮助销售更快达成交易的功能。但技术部门当时的工作重点是开发促进用户增长的功能，所以没能满足销售部门的要求。这件事使得整个公司的氛围都相当紧张。”
听了对方的诉苦，Pisoni 真希望他能明白自己在 Yammer 时学到的非常重要的一课：光靠找人谈话说服是缓和不了关系的。遇到刚刚那种情况时，你不能直接去销售部说：“不是这样的，事情和你想的不一样...产品和技术团队是非常尊重你们的，只是因为他们现在时间比较紧张，但是事情会好的。” 你这样去说服只会让事情变得更糟。那么遇到这种情况你该怎么办呢？
作为领导，你是无法通过找他们谈话就能缓解紧张的关系氛围，你能做的最好的事就是将这种紧张关系公开化。开个会议，让大家列出目前最使公司内部关系紧张的问题。只需要将这些问题在会上提出来就行，让大家都承认这些问题确实存在，但任何人都不要想着去说服任何人。
这其中的奥妙在于你不必自己解决在会上提出的所有问题，你可以和大家说：“我们现在必须要专注，我们不能一次性解决所有问题，所以我们挑出三个最紧迫的问题优先解决。” 通过这种方式，你不用什么问题都自己解决，你给大家指明一个方向，让大家自行解决那些最重要的问题。其它不那么紧急的问题可以放在下次会议上解决。通过这种方式，你甚至不用排列优先级，很多问题就会自行得到解决。
想要做到这样并非易事，但确实能让公司发生巨大变化的有效方法。大家都很抵抗变化，这是事实。大家通常不愿意尝试不熟悉的或让人不舒服的事情。作为领导者，你不应该尝试自己解决公司里的所有问题，但你需要做好授权等工作，打造一个能解决问题的公司和团队。不会带团队，你只能干到死。
作为领导者，你不能遇到什么问题都想要自己快速做出决策。这样做只会慢慢积累你的决策债务。你要做的是去打造一个能决策和解决问题的团队。
本文编译自：firstround.com
The Keys to Scaling Yourself as a Technology Leader
In just four years, Adam Pisoni helped grow Yammer from a team of five with an idea to a company of 500 worth a billion dollars. Today, he’s back to square one, working on a brand new company with just a handful of people — and one question dominates his mind: “What do I want to do differently this time?”
“Everyone sets out to build a great company where great employees all gets along, work hard and profit,” he says. “In reality, more commonly you’ll find yourself not trusting the people you work with and running around like madman trying to keep track of what everyone’s doing. You’ll end up slowing everyone down trying to make sure everyone is making the right decisions. You’ll feel like if you don’t have the pedal to the metal the whole time, the whole thing will collapse.”
How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb from a Failing Startup to a Billion Dollar Business
At the heart of this problem is a widespread misconception of what it means to be a company leader. If you’re a founder, you’re probably laser-focused on building a great product. But earlier than you might imagine, you need to shift your thinking away from building a great product to building the company that builds the great product. It’s a subtle but powerful distinction. If you’re still required to answer every question, you’re never going to scale, Pisoni says.
He took the stage at First Round’s recent CEO Summit to talk about this disconnect in thinking that plagues too many founders and leaders, whether you’re at the head of a team or a company. He also shared the tactics that have worked for him to get out of the weeds and make the biggest impact possible with his time. These are lessons he plans to apply at his new company, Always Be Learning.
Conway’s Law and Finding Your Way Out of the Weeds
“All those times when I was making sure every little thing was working I was missing a whole universe of other things that I should have been thinking about. I didn’t even know they were there and I waited too long to find out,” Pisoni says. “Instead, I was running around trying to do too much myself when we already had dozens of employees. I was in most meetings. I was constantly being asked questions and providing solutions. But not in a good way.”
Here's the real danger: As a leader, you'll probably feel great about how busy you are. It feels like you're adding so much value, when it's just a sign that shit is rolling up hill to you too quickly.
He had no time to stop and think. But when one of his engineers brought upConway’s Law, he froze and decided it was time for some introspection. Basically, Conway’s Law says this: Companies create products and services that are a reflection of themselves, the way they’re organized, communicate and work. Most often products and services get structured to mirror the way the companies producing them are structured.
At Yammer, Pisoni initially oversaw a small squad of engineers to build the original product. They all worked on the codebase, but as they hired more and more people that same original codebase became increasingly unmanageable and monolithic — just like the team. It was only when they started to break the engineering force into smaller teams that they were able to intelligently break up the codebase into smaller services. “The way in which we organized changed the shape of our technology,” he says.
When he was a web developer in the 90s, there was hardly any emphasis on process. Engineers would simply edit live files on web servers. There were no tests. No version control. “That would be absolute insanity today. Now we know that the only way to have a large group of engineers work together is to have a development methodology. But still too few companies lack an organizational methodology — a system or process, outside of engineering, that helps your company operate effectively without requiring you manually managing everything that happens.”
Hyper-Growth Done Right - Lessons From the Man Who Scaled Engineering at Dropbox and Facebook
One area where Yammer got it right was continually iterating on itsdevelopment methodology. The team slowed down as it grew, prompting them to question: “Why can a hack day team build something so much faster than we build on a day-to-day basis?” They realized they were working on too much at once and the communication about what they were building was slow and inefficient. People were stretched thin across multiple projects too much of the time.
“We ended up creating a rule where we wouldn’t even start a project until everyone who was needed could be dedicated,” says Pisoni. “Then we’d put them together in a small, autonomous team that didn’t require any permissions or dependencies to get things done. They’d work on a project for no more than 2-10 weeks, then that team would blow up and everyone would go work on other projects. That went a long way toward obsoleting the need for leadership to manage everything. For example, this system meant I didn’t have to dictate architecture or coding conventions because by having people rotating through the codebases so quickly, we ended up with emergent consistency.
As a leader, your goal should always be to build structures and processes that don't depend on you and ideally don't need you.
The Power of Cadences — and How To Bring Them To Your Company
So how do you build a system that allows big, important things to happen on their own without your managerial oversight? Pisoni’s number one piece of advice: Battle rhythms.
In the course of running your business, leaders have a bunch of work to do and decisions to make. But mostly, it happens randomly and in a reactionary way. There’s no rhyme or reason to when things get decided, when to shift strategy, when to reevaluate. You have no idea how much time and efficiency you could save by creating regular cadences around these actions. Cadences create alignment and transparency. It accelerates execution and — even though it sounds like additional process — actually ends up slashing the number of meetings and checkins needed. There are a few areas where the most momentum can be gained, and — incidentally — where the vast majority of startups run into trouble.
The Brain Hacks Top Founders Use to Get the Job Done
1. Roles & Responsibilities
“Most startups look at big companies and conclude that their rigid org charts and titles slows them down. And they’re right. That does slow them down,” says Pisoni. “The mistake comes where you think the best alternative is to have no structure, no titles, no clear accountabilities. This actually slows you down more! Without clearly defined accountabilities it’s easy for companies to become paralyzed by decision debt and arguments. I’ve never seen a company that scales to any size without realizing they need structure of some kind.”
You don’t need rigid titles and org charts to have clear accountability however. There’s actually something in between: Defining clear roles and responsibilities that aren’t tied to titles or the org chart. These roles should be temporary and flexible. As an exercise to come up with these roles, think through the decisions that have to get made now and in the future. Ask what are the questions that keep bubbling up — especially the questions that you and your leaders are always answering because it’s not clear who should decide? One of the best resources on this is the Citizen Code: Self Organizing Constitution. It contains a lot of good information, but the core ideas are these:
Create a public document that anyone at the company can read which defines roles and responsibilities. For each role list: important metrics for that role, which person(s) hold it, how long the term for that role should be, and what areas of accountability that role owns.
As a leader, commit to never undermining the people who are assigned accountabilities. You have to give them full control. Remember, if you make a mistake, it’s easy to change.
Once you’ve done this, make it clear that the roles you’ve just assigned aren’t permanent. It’s a role, not a title. It’s not an org position. “At Yammer, I was CTO. I had a VP of engineering and directors of engineering,” says Pisoni. “A question would come up such as, ‘Who owns onboarding of new engineers?’ Onboarding was an example of something that fell between the cracks of our org chart and titles. Whenever there was an issue that someone’s title didn’t directly correspond to, it would end up falling up to me. I’d feel great about being able to make quick decisions and move things along, but I didn’t realize how much those types of things slowed us down. If it had to go all the way up to me, it was because the lack of clear responsibility was creating problems.”
In retrospect, he wishes he would have defined roles tied to the major issues facing the business at the time and then committed to reassessing them every month.
Every month, Pisoni recommends having a Roles and Responsibilities check-in with the following format:
People currently holding roles should give a quick retrospective on how they did in their role.
Next, allow people to propose changes such as adding or removing roles which are no longer needed. Or suggesting new or modified accountabilities for existing roles. In some cases, the issue might not even exist anymore, in which case that role can be retired as the person moves on to new challenges.
To decide which proposals to accept recommends a process called Integrative Decision Making. IDM allows a large group of people to deal with incremental changes and proposals without relying on rank to be the final judge. With IDM, anyone can make a proposal. Once a proposal is raised, there is a round of clarifying questions, a round of reactions, a chance for the proposer to make amendments, and finally a round of objections. The key is that the only valid objection is that the proposed change will cause material harm the business before it can be corrected. The idea of this process is to create a bias towards trying ideas wherever they come from. This works because even if it’s wrong, you can try something different in a month.
Adam Pisoni on stage at First Round CEO Summit.
2. Monitoring Progress
“I absolutely hate status meetings. Worse than status meetings are status reports that roll up,” says Pisoni. “But then how do you keep everyone informed and aligned when things are constantly changing?”
Again, you don’t have to go to extremes as a leader. You don’t need tons of meetings and you shouldn’t get rid of all of them either. Pisoni saw how this might work firsthand while visiting General Stanley McChrystal, who formerly oversaw all American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“He had this problem that is significantly worse than anything you’re dealing with — tens of thousands of people who needed to be precisely aligned in an environment that literally changed daily,” he says. “He ended up creating a process where every single day for 90 minutes, thousands of people from all over the world would dial in to a rapid-fire update meeting. Each group had 90 seconds to say what they did, what they’re doing next and what the risks or blockers are. Then there’d be a couple minutes for quick, clarifying questions.”
Pisoni recommends startup leaders do something very similar weekly. The goal of this meeting is not to solve problems or to figure out who should be doing what. It didn’t make any sense to try to solve problems with that many people in a limited amount of time. General McChrystal realized that all the real value would take place in the conversations during and after the daily call. The real challenge was giving everyone the information they needed to even have these conversations at a regular cadence. During the meeting, people can be chatting in a backchannel chat. After the meeting people will reach out to each other to confirm what they heard and ask further questions. He recommends the whole company be invited to listen in or participate, making it a truly cross-functional meeting.
McChrystal himself realized that his job in these meetings wasn’t to solve people’s problems. Rather, it was to model the behavior of finding the best person to solve any given issue. He never claimed to have all the answers or to be able to make every big decision. He would take his important conversations offline and encourage others to do the same.
It’s vital that everyone in your organization has an accurate and constant sense of the progress you’re making so that they know when they can and should jump in to help, or when their expertise might come into play. Putting a stake in the ground and saying, ‘This is where we’re at,’ lets many distributed pockets of authority work smart without relying too much on central authority figures.
3. Retrospectives
On a good day, a startup leader can only hold a few vital goals in their head. One of them should always be to stop repeating mistakes.
Unfortunately, the most reliable way to do this is to get involved in everything to make sure people stop making the same errors. This doesn’t scale. So, what can you do instead? Hold regular retrospectives. Instead of teams holding their own private retrospectives, he recommends having a company wide retrospective meeting where any teams that finished a project or managed a problem over the past month can present. If you do them frequently, they don’t have to be as detailed. Done well, each project can be limited to 5-10 minutes. It’s the practice of it that has the impact.
Another quality of successful retrospectives: Focusing them around hypotheses. Don’t just use the time to look back at what you did. Really get into the nitty gritty of whether it worked or not. And even if it did work, could it have been better? “Always distill what hypothesis you were trying to test. What did you learn from the success or failure of that hypothesis?” he says. “Beyond that, what worked about the process you used? What didn’t work?”
Using metrics during these sessions is important. If you hold retrospectives, you want to look at key metrics for the projects in question — and they should be outcome based, not output based. For example, a good metric might be customer retention. A bad metric would be number of powerpoint decks created. That’s not an outcome-based metric. Outcome-based metrics are the ones that matter to your customers.
Finally, consider what you would do differently next time. “The way I like to ask this question is, ‘What weren’t we doing that we should start doing next time?” Pisoni says. “What were we doing that we should stop doing? What should we continue doing?” Those are the few, salient ideas you want to capture from everything you do.
4. Planning and Prioritization
Many startup founders are so embroiled in the present moment that they don’t look ahead to shifting course or switching up priorities. But it’s inevitable. The worst thing you can do is lock yourself in a room with a few other leaders at your company and emerge with a whole new set of projects and priorities. People will freak out and feel left out. They won’t take on accountability with the same enthusiasm. And every time you do this, they’ll be slightly less bought into your vision and long-term success than they were before. Part of the reason the organizational methodology of battle rhythms works is that it gives you enough evenly-spaced check ins and forced communications that you won’t fall into this trap. But you still need to be mindful of it.
Pisoni recommends having an all day, or even multi-day planning and prioritization meeting at least once a quarter. This meeting is part uber-retrospective and part planning and prioritization. What did we learn last quarter? How should that influence our strategy moving forward? Then, global priorities should be set across the whole company. Everyone should be focused on the same high level goals. Maybe it’s growth this quarter or revenue. Finally, based on your new priorities, decide what you’re going to STOP doing.
It’s surprisingly difficult to tell people to stop doing something. Here they were just super invested in their work on a task, and now you’re telling them to desist. People don’t let go easily, especially when there’s insufficient explanation or gratitude. They want to make an impact. This is just one way that change will create tensions within your org.
5. Managing Tension
No matter how good you are and how tightly aligned your team is, there's going to be tough, ongoing tension within your company, and you can't ignore it.
Two weeks ago, Pisoni met with the founder of a small tech company that said, “You know, our sales department is frustrated because they want engineering to build features that help them close deals. But engineering are prioritizing growth features instead — so they’re just working on stuff for the top of the funnel like virality. This is a tremendous tension within the company.”
If he’s learned one thing from his experience at Yammer, it’s that you can’t talk people out of tension. Trying to do that is a huge mistake almost every time. You can’t go to sales and say, “No no no, it’s not what you think... product and engineering respects you, they just don’t have the time now, but it will be fine.” That’s only going to make things worse. So what should you do?
“There this process that I recommend, where instead of digging in and trying to resolve tensions as a leader, your only goal should be to make tensions public,” he says. “You’re just going to say, We’re going to have a regular meeting at a regular interval where we’ll outline what the big tensions are.’”
Maybe you decide to integrate this into one of your other standing meetings — like a status or planning meeting. It’s as simple as listing them out. You just want everyone to acknowledge that they are happening. No one should try to talk anyone out of any tension they express.
“The beauty of this is that you don’t have to fix all of the problems that come up at this meeting,” says Pisoni. “Now you have the permission to say, ‘Look, we have to focus. We can’t deal with all of this at once, so let’s pick three tensions we’re going to work on.’ Suddenly, you as the leader aren’t responsible for all the tensions all the time. You gave people the direction and momentum to deal with the top issues on their own, and you can say that the rest will be handled when they come up in future meetings. In most cases, tensions will resolve before you ever have to prioritize them.”
Implementing this advice isn’t going to be easy, but it is the fastest way to make big change at your company. It’s an immutable truth that humans are resistant to change. They don’t like trying things that are unfamiliar or uncomfortable. As a leader, you shouldn’t be handling all the problems at your company, but you do need to be able to weather this storm as you distribute decision-making and scale your capacity. That’s in fact most of the challenge to running a quickly growing company. You need to increase your capacity faster than you increase headcount with the lightest weight structure possible.
As a leader, you can't make decisions as fast as you're faced with them. You'll just accrue decision debt and think it's your job to get out of it by making decisions faster and faster. Instead, make it your job to build structure so decision debt doesn't accrue in the first place.
“You’re ahead of the game if you recognize that solving the problems you have today are going to create new problems tomorrow. You’ll find solutions to those problems and the cycle will go on and on ad nauseum until you die,” says Pisoni. “That might sound depressing, but once you get used to it, it actually takes tremendous weight off your shoulder. You realize it’s fine. That’s how life is. It’s not that you’re constantly failing. You’re constantly reframing and moving forward.”
Adam Pisoni
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