Metadata
- Author: hey.com
- Full Title:: Manage Process Before People
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://world.hey.com/dhh/manage-process-before-people-20736695
- Finished date:: 2023-10-28
Highlights
If you want to run a company that’s light on full-time managers, you have to focus on managing processes before people. The traditional paradigm of a reporting manager that’s constantly following up with their reports, conducting daily stand-up meetings, weekly 1-1s, and all other forms of intensive supervision, needs to be (mostly) replaced with an asynchronous, self-managing paradigm instead. (View Highlight)
As with many things with these people: they sound super cool, but unrealistic (unless you have really clever people working, in which case any process works): who makes sure this is not a useless exercise?
First, we’ve replaced the commonly used daily stand-up meetings with a set of automated questions in Basecamp. On Monday mornings, we ask everyone “What are you going to work on this week?”, and at the end of every day, we ask “What did you work on today?“. These two recurring questions provide the key process for keeping everyone – not just a manager, but peers and colleagues from other teams as well – in the loop on what someone is working on. (View Highlight)
Second, we confine the vast majority of product management planning decisions to happen only once every other month. Our Shape Up methodology has us working in 6-week cycles (View Highlight)