The primary role of company leadership is to create alignment 🧵
Most companies go through several phases of growth, each with their own predictable challenges. In my experience most startups slowly move from being clans or adhocracies towards more process oriented companies.
This happens because alignment is usually implicit within smaller groups, but needs to become more explicit as teams grow and develop their own perspectives.
Everybody is trying to build the most successful business, but each group has their own lens through which they view this (and each group believes their lens is the right one).
Designers are trying to build the "best" product.
Marketers are trying to drive the most traffic/sign-ups.
Product people are trying to grow revenue.
All are related but all are subtly different in ways that become confusing.
*The above is a massive over simplification btw, but you get what I mean.
As such a leaders job increasingly becomes about creating alignment between different groups and viewpoints.
You can achieve company, team and individual alignment at various levels and in various ways...
1. Culture 2. Values and Principles 3. Roles and Responsibilities 4. Governance 5. Metrics 6. Conversation and Negotiation 7. Performance Reviews
Some companies I’ve worked with love using metrics and OKRs to help with alignment. Others like codifying and sharing values, principles, roles and responsibilities to improve clarity amongst team. Some work on their conflict competence.
Others put governance structures in place to make decision making processes clear. Each team is different and what works for one may not work for another. So some experimentation is required.
The biggest challenge for first time leaders of departments that have never had leaders before, is that you're having to create all these things from scratch.
Now on the section of “No Rules, Rules” about the Netflix unlimited vacation policy. It’s good that their senior leadership attempt to “model good behaviour” by taking lots of time off work…
However I’m my experience executives are often responsible for their own diaries and workloads so can do this easily. More junior staff often have their workloads set externally by managers, PMs or just the throughput of work.
It’s easy for the factory boss to step away, but when too many workers step away from the production line, work starts backing up and effecting everybody. As such taking holiday becomes a complex negotiation.
Reading the “No Rules, Rules” book about the Amazon feedback culture is making my British self squirm.
While many of the examples are positioned as “Radical Candour” I’m getting very little sense that the people giving said feedback “cared deeply” about the target of said feedback. As such a lot of it comes across as “obnoxious aversion” or simply rudeness, to my British ears.
I’ve always worried that “Radical Candour” favours people in power. I’ve actually done product management consultancy at companies where their adoption of this practice borders on management bullying.
1. There’s an old saying that “people don’t leave jobs, they leave mangers” and this can often be true. Being looked after by a poorly trained, inexperienced or under performing manager can be deeply frustrating.
So in order to improve staff retention, companies should provide better support and training to both new and experienced managers alike. Senior managers should also be hired based on their managerial skills rather than their craft skills.
I’m really liking @gilescolborne’s formulation that design research (aka discovery) is about charging the opportunity battery, rather than delivering value. I think is explains a lot of behaviour designers find frustrating 🧵
Designers have been taught they need to understand the context of a problem before they can come up with the ideal solution. The whole “understanding the room to design the chai, understanding the house to design the room etc”
However I think a lot of designers get hit by discovery inflation. Essentially for every piece of research they do, they discover a new unknown. As such you often find designers getting draw into understanding problems at a city wide level, forgetting about the chair altogether.
I see a growing disconnect in our industry between companies wanting to hire the most talented people, and the experience the most talented people I know have during the interview process. A short thread 🧵
I see a lot of company leaders complaining that they can't find people with the right skills and experience to fill their open roles. Roles will often go unfilled for months, and when they do finally fill those roles, the person will be a poor fit and leave within months.
At the same time I hear from so many objectively talented people about being on the job market for 9 months, having countless interviews and being continually ghosted by companies.