A Manual For Everything in this Company
What’s the most mind-blowing occupation you’ve heard? How about an ‘actor for your life.’ Perhaps, you might have heard of this ‘actor for your life’ in a simpler form or variation. For instance, in some African countries like Ghana, you can hire professional mourners to ‘cry’ at a burial.
However, Family Romance pushes this concept to the next level. It is an eight yr old company based in Japan with 800 ‘staff’ (or to be more accurate: actors), who you can hire to fill any role in your personal life. Family romance’s motto is “more than real.” Their stated goal is to provide an experience that’s better than real life.
Now, the examples are where it gets really crazy. Among the jobs that Ishii Yuichi (he’s the CEO/founder and unsurprisingly, also an ‘actor’) has done is to play the ‘father’ of a girl. Ishii’s acted this particular role for the last eight years, and the girl has zero clue that he’s not her real dad! As if that’s not wild enough, he goes on to say “If the daughter gets married, I have to act as a father in that wedding, and then I have to be the grandfather.” Another example you might like is that he’s sometimes hired to be a ‘boyfriend.’ In his boyfriend role, he gets paid to go on dates and play the part of a caring partner. (In case you were wondering, the answer is no. No kissing or sex allowed).
How about the one where he gets to play the ‘groom’? In this case, Ishii says, “they have an entire wedding, and it’s a fake wedding, except for the client’s family. The friends and everyone else are fake. My side is all fake. Fifty fake people all pretending it’s real” (now I understand why the company has 800 ‘staff’- you need a lot of actors to sustain this charade).
Reading Ishii’s interview, the million dollar question I kept on asking myself is: how does this guy even manage to pull off any of this? I mean I can’t even pretend to be angry for ten mins! Well, the answer according to him is that “there’s manual for everything in this company. We use psychology to determine the optimal outcome.”
“There’s a manual for everything in this company. We use psychology to determine the optimal outcome”
Immediately, I read the line “manual for everything” it suddenly all made perfect sense to me. It means Ishii and his team have taken time to document what they do; which means to have procedures and policies in place that enables them to carry out their elaborate acts.
As a startup founder, it’s easy to accept that the concept of having a ‘manual for everything’ will be great, but how does one find the time to do that? We’re so consumed with finding new customers, keeping old customers, building new features, plugging gaps in product, etc. that there’s no time to do anything as cerebral as documenting what we’re doing. Not to forget; how do you write a manual when you’re still busy figuring things out? It’s not easy to write about things you don’t know!
However, one area that I recommend documenting everything is on-boarding new joiners. At PrognoStore, as we’re a small team which works entirely remote, we’ve realised that the most productive way to shorten the learning curve for new team members is to have a ‘manual for everything’ approach. We take on-boarding seriously and do so in three broad steps:
A Handbook for new joiners
A handbook provides a high-level breakdown of all the necessary knowledge a newbie needs to know once they join us. This is information they will know eventually anyway. On the other hand, they find this ‘knowledge’ fragmented all over the place from; ad-hoc meetings, desperate phone calls, random emails, impromptu slack messages, angry mental notes to ask why-didn’t-anyone-tell-me-this-in-the-first place! etc. A handbook is in effect saving everyone a great deal of pain and at the same time, codifying your culture in writing. It’s a mixture of practical tips, current practices, and aspirational goals. There are no fast rules on how to do this but below are the topics we covered:
Introduction
What Do We Stand For
What Are We Trying To Do — Our Values
How Do We Think
How We Work
Who Does What
Getting Started
When You Leave
Our Internal Systems
Our Products
Side Projects
A Checklist to get started
Once we had the handbook out of the way, the next question was: how do we shorten the learning curve? In effect, how do we ensure that the new folks who we know are brilliant (remember they passed interviews…more on that later) can deliver on their promise and potential?
I’m a firm believer in Atul Gawande’s theory where he talks about errors that professionals make. In his book, the Checklist Manifesto, he makes the distinction between errors of ignorance (mistakes we commit because we don’t know better) and errors of ineptitude (mistakes we make because we don’t make proper use of what we know). According to Atul, failure in the modern world is really about the second of these errors — people don’t make proper use of what they know.
That’s why we have a new beginner’s checklist for every department; to help us – shorten the learning curve – and bridge any expectation gap. The checklist comes under the ‘Getting Started’ section of the Handbook. You can check out our new engineer joiner checklist here.
It starts from the beginning
Okay, I left one crucial bit out. In the first place, a manual (or in our case; Handbook and Checklist for new beginners) only makes sense if you get the right people. And getting the ‘right people’ starts from your interview process.
For us, our interview process is structured to mirror the way we work. There’s a take-home component, technical skype interview, and final phone interview. Every stage revolves around not just being technical or clever, but, includes an element of being organized enough to either deliver your work or communicate without seeing the other person.
We’re optimising for people whose skillsets and temperament is in sync with how we work.
I don’t know if I will ever be like the legend Ishii and have a manual for everything. But if you ever wondered what if feels like to work in a company determined to make it easy for developers to join and thrive — definitely check us out at PrognoStore. We’re looking for you too.
