A brief spoken piece by Jason M. Lemkin defining and signaling a “hyper-aggressive” management team: everyone on the management team is visibly executing faster across product, sales, and operations, showing measurable increases in velocity and alignment. Lemkin argues this rare, high-velocity state is the CEO’s secret to startup momentum and difficult to create and sustain.
What are the signs or smells that suggest hyper aggressive to you? Founders will be listening to this going the management team. There's a tension in the management team to move faster. Every single person in the management team says we are shipping product faster, I am selling harder, I'm getting on the road more, I am generating more leads. Every single person on your management team is sweating it and they're executing faster. You can just see they come to your board meeting, they come to whatever and there is velocity in every area. We just don't. How many times do you truly see velocity increase in a board meeting? Not that common, right? That's hyper aggressive mode. Everyone is aligned on this somehow. This makes a great CEO. This is very hard for co to do. Everything is anti inertia. Everything slows down even in an early stage startup, right? And then when you come in and everyone's sweating and they're like, you know, we shipped twice the story points, twice the software as last quarter and we're still falling behind and I'm pissed. But these days in the area of great job, I just don't see it enough. And that's what you need. You need to make your team hyper aggressive. It is an unnatural state.
