Optimize for iteration speed

How fast you and your team respond to each other is paramount to how fast you iterate and therefore how much you get done.

I had this manager a little less than a decade back who would run around the whole day going to meetings.

His calendar was like 80% booked even a month in advance because of all the recurring meetings.

We had a one-on-one every two weeks if i remember correctly and so that is where you’d get his inputs.

And if you needed something in-between the expectation was that you’d email him and he’d get back to you within a few days to a week. Or so.

Unless of course it was an emergency as then you could send him a direct message (I think they used Slack but I don’t remember).

Anyway my point is it was an extremely inefficient way of managing and in hindsight i consider him completely useless as a manager. Hahahaha

And today i’m going to explain why.

What happens when you get infrequent feedback?

Let’s dissect what happens in a situation like the one i describe above, shall we?

I would often need to take a number of calls that would be good to have his alignment on. But I typically needed to make a decision in a day or so because it would need to go into development.

And so i’d sometimes write this out to him in an email, which took a long time. But it was a coin toss as to whether i’d hear back in time.

And at some point you feel like you should just go ahead and go with your gut.

But then on a number of occasions i did that to find out later in the one-on-one that he was completely unaligned. And this of course becomes my fault.

Except is it?

I mean when you don’t reply to your emails/messages quickly and expect a person to get all the decisions once every two weeks what exactly do you expect?

Unless the organization is operating at snail speed then the manager is going to become the bottleneck very often. At least if they want to make sure they’re aligned with everything.

What happens when you get frequent feedback?

With my system the past four years I did away with all of this foolishness.

I typically have at least 20 people essentially reporting direct to me, which is at least 2x more than this manager I refer to above. Right now if i counted across my clients and my own d2c ecom business, Reviv, I probably have at least 40.

But there are clickup tasks for everything. I’m following all of the tasks that I want to ensure i’m aligned on.

When they want my input they comment on the task with their question and i get a notification to my Clickup inbox, which i respond to. I clear all of my Clickup inboxes (3 in total) every couple of hours.

I also clean my Slack messages every hour.

The expectation that they can have for me is that they can get feedback within a few hours on Clickup and within an hour on Slack. Always.

If not than i’m dropping the ball. Which I pretty much never do.

And if it is something complex then they can just ask me on Slack for an immediate call. Which I almost always have time for.

Why? Because I have almost zero recurring meetings.

End result.. I am aligned and they are happy because they don’t need to do any re-work. They have my input before they have to shoot off and invest time into it.

I get sooooooo much more shit done than this manager i refer to above

When I compare how this works to that idiotic way that I had to work in that company it is not even close.

The way that that manager managed was an absolute shit show.

And the results of that team demonstrated that fact very clearly. If you were to look at what they actually achieved for how much headcount was involved and the cost of that headcount.

I wouldn’t surprised if I am 20x more cost efficient than him. Plus I probably get things done 3-4x faster on average.

But is there some side benefit to his system that my system misses? hmmm

Yes… his system allowed him to have lots of face time and develop lots of relationships. Excuse me while i fucking barf. LOL

These days I do shit my way

The days of working for fools like that are over for me.

I run two of my own profitable businesses and use my system in everything i do. Even when working for clients.

And I love it. I love each day I’m working.

Weekdays fly by. It’s as if the weekends come too fast.

And i’m never stressed or worried about someone’s opinion during the weekend as I was in my old days. I’m thinking how i’m going to take my business to the next level.

A headhunter recently asked to chat and asked me whether I was interested in some large tech org. I had to bite my lip to prevent myself from laughing.

As i thought in my head… “hmmm do i wanna kiss someone’s ass as i follow some inefficient, political-based system so that I can make money for other people?”

I smiled and just said “nahhhh i’m good.”

Closing thoughts

I was talking to a guy on Lunchclub recently who had been in the corporate world his entire career and had made his way up the ranks to a pretty senior SVP level. But had been laid off and was in his late 40’s.

He’d been job hunting for awhile and was struggling. He wanted to break into the startup world but was finding it hard to get interviews for senior roles.

As we talked we got on the subject of how we manage teams. And he described something very similar to this old manager of mine i described above.

And you could tell from the way he talked that he actually thought he was a very good manager. His teams could email him and he’d always respond within a week.

When i heard that part I had to struggle to keep a straight face.

He was a dinosaur and he didn’t even know it.

There are new rules to this game. And the folks that are playing by the old ones… are gonna realize that that old shit don’t cut it anymore :).