Management as a service
I’ve been running companies for more than 10 years and I’ve come to learn that being a company’s founder involves doing many hard things. One of the hardest is assuming the role of the manager and I believe I am not alone in this struggle.
Sure there are so many good books on the topic and people have been doing this since forever. From the Parthenon to Facebook, management has always been a crucial part of human evolution.
As a manager I was always overwhelmed by the day to day challenges my work involved. So instead of helping people thrive, I ended up managing tasks or micromanaging my team.
This fundamental realization made me think of management as a problem, or in other words, made me think of management as a bug.
Management as a problem
As a geek I will always look for software solutions to my problems. If I wrote a piece of code that could save me 1 minute every day I would do it even if it took a few hours to complete. In the long run that mentality helped a lot.
This is how I approached management after I saw it as a problem.
It annoyed me that everything related to company transparency and team synchronisation has to be a person’s job. Knowing how important but also boring and time consuming all this can be, I realised a big portion of a manager’s job could be automated.
In order to be effective in a traditional corporate environment, a manager is required to know everything about the business and use that information to help team members sync their tasks and align goals.
Transparency matters
There are several problems with this approach. For one, the manager has the responsibility to lead, which is not really effective as more than one leaders may exist in a team. It is clear that this model does not help emerging leaders or even worse, does not allow them to lead.
This is also a problem for scalability. Growing a team means adding more managers, which leads to more information lockdown and even more depressed leaders in your organisation.
So how do you keep all information available to everyone so they can have enough data to detect and solve problems on their own?
The agile model
All these problems are addressed, at least in part, by the agile methodology. Managers are still essential but at least the information flows mostly through the process of standup meetings.
So every day the manager will call a standup meeting and everyone will have to respond in 3 questions very quickly:
- What did you accomplish yesterday?
- What will you do today?
- What obstacles are impeding your progress?
This works great but only under certain conditions
1. Your team is located in the same place at the same time every day
2. You don’t have departments or multiple teams
3. You are not running a distributed team, or plan to be one in the future
How it worked for our team
Since this team started 8 years ago, it was extremely important being able to work remotely at any time and place. This was probably the reason we started thinking of alternatives to our day to day operations.
We followed the process of agile methodology, but our own traits were blocking us from using it effectively. Working at different times and places made even arranging a meeting a pretty complex and time consuming task.
Adding the previous problem to our initial goal, of having a transparent and leader-friendly environment, we came up with a simple solution that deals with both problems in one go.
A manager’s problem becomes a bot’s problem
You might say that there should be an app for a problem like that, but in 2016 I think that a bot would be better for the job.
So we created Geekbot and it is responsible for doing all the hard work of getting, keeping and spreading the information that is essential for any team to thrive.
We put Geekbot in charge of our daily standups and weekly goals. Soon after we noticed that we did not need to make regular meetings as often as before. Team members now knew more about other peoples blocking issues and were self managed.
So instead of having a person responsible for “information synchronisation” in our team, we had Geekbot set up in our Slack and our day to day operations were finally seamless.
Every day the bot will ask the standup questions, broadcast the answers in a Slack channel and keep them for future reference in the dashboard.
You can see it in action here.
It is a simple, yet effective solution to all the problems mentioned above. We have been using it for a few months now, along with a few hundreds teams that joined our beta (among them many fortune 500 companies) and it looks like it saves up a lot of time and allows us to be more focused.
Of course there is more to come. As we grow we teach the bot how to talk, solve more complicated “overhead” kind of business problems, etc.
I believe it is time for creative people to have tools like Geekbot help manage their teams efforts while they do what they know best, create stuff :)
What do you think?
