Save your startup with an icebox
It’s a well-worn truism that being an effective startup leader is more about choosing what not to do, than what to do.
That’s all well and good, but how do you scale that to your whole company?
Our answer: the ice-box.
Apparently a term coined by Pivotal Tracker in 2005, it’s otherwise known as the ‘backlog’ in software engineering and is a standard feature of sprint planning.
The product icebox contains all those things that you think you might want to do, but not now.
It creates a ‘soft no’ area — people’s ideas can be recorded, and are always available in the future, but they are not acted on until picked out of the icebox.
We realized that exactly the same principle can be applied to other business areas: the marketing icebox, the sales icebox and the operations icebox. That means that anyone in the company can share great ideas for things outside their area without us having to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Now, when we embark upon a new month in marketing, we review the whole icebox and choose a month’s worth of activities from the best items in there.
So as a company, we now say ‘no’ to everything by default, and only pick the best ideas to say ‘yes’ to, when we’ve had time to think about what those best ideas are. Goodbye recency bias, goodbye ‘random CEO ideas’, hello ‘best ideas from across the company’.
Try it out yourself, you might be surprised!
John
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