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Sean Everett argues that organizations move faster with fewer meetings, clearer handoffs, protected quiet time, and quicker iteration cycles. Large companies slow innovation by adding process instead of removing it.
Sean Everett argues that organizations move faster with fewer meetings, clearer handoffs, protected quiet time, and quicker iteration cycles. Large companies slow innovation by adding process instead of removing it.
Good morning. Happy Friday. We did it. It's the end of the week. Congratulations, you made it too. Um, all right, something that just keeps coming up, so, you know, as a product person, can't ignore it. Gotta talk about it. Um, organization, collaboration. How do we as a small organization or even a big organization work with each other In order to get things done collectively faster, better, cheaper. The holy grail, right? All 3. Um, here's the thing. So what's the process? What's the basic process? Well, somebody has to do something, do some work. You need someone else to review that work, and then you need to ship that work and send it out to whoever needs it. So I think a lot of things get caught up in just that review piece. I think the do work, a lot of that just gets— the thing that gets in the way of that is just too many meetings, too many conference calls, too many cooks in the kitchen. Like, you're doing a job, you're supposedly good at what you do, that's why they hired you, and everybody has an opinion. At some point, people have to just let go. Not everybody needs to be in the room for everything. So, what's your role? What are you doing? Everyone else trusts you to do that thing, and you trust them to do their thing, and you just hand the work off to each other. So, you get it done, you send it to the person to review it, maybe an edit or two. Okay, great. That's more than enough. Send it along and the next person can do the work. Okay. Now the next person, they take the work, they do what they need to do with it, gets reviewed again, gets pushed along. And the more this round robin thing occurs, like every single department needs to weigh in on it, the slower it becomes. And the more you chop up this work into finer-grained detail where one person only owns a small subsection of it, the more complex this gets. So that's when you need some kind of map that shows people, you know, what's the amount of time it should take to do something, review something, who it should go to after that for review, and then where it goes after that. I mean, every person Should know pretty basically, like, I get something from these people and I send the thing to these people. That's just handoffs. I mean, it's not super complex. And then I guess the other thing just about meetings in general, I mean, that it's great, but it just feels like a cop-out and a shortcut. And like, oh, we don't know the answer to something. Let's just— Like literally grab someone's calendar and just shove a meeting invite on there. I don't know, I've just always been of the mindset that like that's super invasive. Like someone else controls your time at work, they just plop meetings on there. I'm not a big fan of that. Like it should be the other way around, like protect the quiet work time. How are you supposed to get anything done? So anyways, I think You need quiet work time, cut the meetings in half, get rid of them, they're not needed, cut down the amount of reviewers and have a very clear process of where my work comes from, where it goes. And if you can increase the cycle time through that entire system, that entire organization, you get higher iteration speeds and you start moving and shipping faster than competitors. And that has a direct correlation with the growth that you will achieve in the marketplace. The reason big companies sort of fall over this innovator's dilemma, like we're not inventing enough, you know, that's probably 25-50%. But the bigger thing is like they just get so big, they slow down because nobody knows what's going on. All right, that's it. Have a happy Friday. Clean it up. Cut some of those meetings out. Stop letting people control your time. It's your calendar. Own it. You got the power. Toodles.
