On The Importance Of Urgency

On August 21 2019 I shared the following message with all DataCamp employees via Slack:

Hi All! I could not help but noticing that when talking about “time units to get things done” we are more and more defaulting to “weeks”: e.g. “We can get this done in maybe 3 weeks”. At the beginning, our default time unit communicated for deadlines was “hours”. For some reason it became “days”, and now the standard seems to be “weeks”. My prediction is that if we don’t stop this trend together we’ll soon be speaking in “months”, “quarters”, “years”, “decades”, … There is an important psychological element to this that tricks us into thinking we are moving fast (21 days sounds a lot more as 3 weeks).

Given our size, “hours” is not realistic, but I do suggest we reverse the trend and stop using weeks and go back to “days”. Myself included. Given our current growth stage and competitive landscape, we need to be a fast-moving company that understands the importance of urgency in delivering value (NSM) and bringing ourselves to profitability ($$). It is Day 1 every day: https://bit.ly/2nId2a0.

(Open to answer questions on this at tomorrow’s bi-weekly if any)

This sparked interesting debate internally (Way more vs what I expected, but I believe debate is healthy and the more intense the better.), and it was fascinating to see how the message was interpreted by different people in different departments and offices. Some felt more responsible for this as they should, and visa versa.

I decided to clarify my message with a longer post to all team members. By sharing the post publicly, I want to give insight into how we try to think about creating a culture we believe helps DataCamp to achieve its long term goals.

Given our current growth stage and competitive landscape, we need to be a fast-moving company that understands the importance of urgency in delivering value (North Star Metric) and bringing ourselves to profitability eventually ($$).

It is about operational efficiency, growing revenue, becoming profitable and building a world class platform, and together we need to figure out how we can sharpen the pencil on those.

DataCamp is now larger, which has resulted in things moving substantially more slowly than they used to. Along with the company growing larger and securing funding, there is naturally more of a sense of security, which can lead to complacency that we must fight against. (If success goes up, urgency goes down, and it’s a killer).

We must be cautious of shrugging our shoulders and saying, well, “the company is now bigger so this is the new normal” and instead retain the same mentality that got us to where we are.

As a company we need to be sure we retain our sense of urgency to “win”. Some things that demonstrate a healthy sense of urgency:

• Asking tough questions (at our bi-weekly all hands or elsewhere) and not ignoring the “elephant in the room”
• Making sure there is a high ROI on each new team member we hire.
• Maintaining laser focus on the things that matter most. Even at the expense of stakeholder requests.
• Being critical on our product when competitors launch a new feature/course that could potentially make DataCamp no longer the preferred way of learning for our customers.

I think there have been fewer questions and debates like this in the past months, indicating to me urgency is going down. There can be multiple reasons for this pattern, and I encourage you to share them with me. To be clear, It’s not just about working hard, staying late or putting in “crazy hours”. It’s about working on the right things, in the right order, at the right speed. High-velocity decision making is crucial.

Urgency does NOT necessarily mean “crazy hours”.

By referencing day 1, I wanted to be clear that we should at all times ask ourselves the question “what can we do in 5 days that is close enough?” vs spending months on something that might not work. The ask is not to translate 2 months of engineering time into days. It is about delivering value via throughput as one Engineering Lead correctly pointed out to me, not about project estimation. Without throughput there is no value created nor is there any feedback.

I realize this is a hard problem, but that is why we are at DataCamp :-) If it wasn’t hard, it wouldn’t be worth it. We have to take a decade worth of success and do it in half the time, but committing to incredibly short timelines — is what we do in growth companies. That’s not a DataCamp thing — it’s a business thing.

Remember — we are burning cash. That phase will end like it does for every growth company. This is why we talk about operational efficiency and accelerating all things possible — because these are things we control. It’s up to us to find a way to win.