Thy Friends’ Joy is Not Thine’s Enemy
As our team grows, an increasing amount of time is spent talking instead of doing. And we’re talking to each other, instead of talking to customers. It feels like the early stages of a death spiral, where we lose touch with our customers, build the wrong things if we build anything at all, and become irrelevant. It stresses me out. To make it more poignant, our company culture is pretty jovial by design, which means my friends’ joy is my enemy. Great.
Here’s the thing:
They are right, and I am wrong.
I’m good at getting from zero to one, which is all about swashbuckling and making executive decisions. Just build something right now, get it in front of customers today, find out what’s actually broken compared to what we think is probably broken. Rinse and repeat.
Get a customer email at 10am that we’re missing a feature? No problem: write the feature and deploy to production at 3pm, complete with a blog post, docs page, and a personal email to the customer. It builds customer loyalty in an unbelievable way.
But after a few years of doing this, we’ve identified projects that are fundamental to the future health of the company. And they are not five hour, same-day-deploy features. They’ll take months from beginning to end, involve several design stages, extensive QC and a lot of internal conversations.
Whiplash is not at zero anymore, trying to get to one. Our company is complex, with non-obvious edges abound, and if we don’t think through problems diligently as a group, we’re going to cause as many problems as we fix.
When I want everyone to go silent and just write code, it’s like taking a trip to China and demanding that we swim there to save time. I’m so anxious to get started that I can’t be bothered to buy a plane ticket that won’t leave for a couple of weeks. That would be weeks of time wasted. Weeks! Wasted!
My instinct is to run down to the bay and dive in. I want to feel the water against my skin and know that progress is being made. I want to feel my muscles burn, so I know that work is being done.
That’s not going to end well.
The team has to talk, and bond over things that aren’t always work. Teach each other, and come up with answers that represent the diversity of perspectives and knowledge they’ve each accumulated.
My job as CEO is to use the information we’ve gathered to set our trajectory and make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction. To make sure our team has access to the information they need to make educated decisions. To be patient when high quality work takes time, and have compassion when people take risks and make mistakes.
Like so many things, it’s a simple set of rules, and a lifetime trying to get it right. But one thing is for sure: thy friends’ joy is not thine’s enemy.
