Team
I’ve wondered why small teams work. What is it about them that drive results? I think the answer is that they empower people to make changes giving them ownership over the outcome. People have pride when they see their work actualized. They like to point and say I did that. It is a good feeling.
I'm looking to see how to setup Notion in such a way that it is easy to manage multiple teams as individual units. I don’t want them to really interact and as a secondary they should be provided value.
Hiring
The best way to judge people is to have them do problems right off the bat and see how they work with your team. Unfortunately, I do think algorithmic problems have a place for companies like Google and Amazon which are triaging through thousands of candidates. However, startups doing this seems like a bad call. Most of the time as a startup you are trying to figure out not if someone can do a bureaucratic task like pulling an algorithm out of their ass, but do they know the context of the code they are building. Can they understand the library ecosystem and use existing tooling.
One effective process I’ve found in weeding out ineffective people is hire them fast and put them on simple problems in the codebase that shouldn’t take more than an hour to accomplish. If they solve it in that time or find additional problems. Wonderful, we can start working more together and I just continue assigning tasks. If they can’t get anything done within the first hour or two when they said they will. I will cut them.
To remove my bias on people and different backgrounds I do not have video calls. I only chat with them and write the issues they need in GitHub Issues. Sometimes I send a Loom video if there is something that can be explained better.
Seems like it is working thus far.
Roles, Responsibilities, and Ownership
All jobs are created in with the following information:
- Job Description
- Responsibilities: What does this Position have ultimate responsibility and decision authority over? Clearly define the products, services, assets, activities, and subordinates assigned to the Position.
- Expectations: Expectations specify the results required of a Position if the Firm is to achieve its objectives. Expectations should be clear, specific, and measurable. They should focus on the desired outcomes rather than on the activities that might be required to produce those outcomes. Expectations must also be open-ended and challenging enough to expand a Position’s vision of what can be contributed. This encourages experimentation and innovation.
- Access
- What are they given access to and how do they use it.
- Each Person is given the least amount of access needed to accomplish their jobs.
- Training
- The information they need to be most effective at their job including anything particular related to how they perform their job, the set of principles we adhere, etc.
- Routine
- If the job involves only doing a singular task then it should be located here.
- Routine
- Link to the recurring task that the role is responsible for accomplis
- Manager
- The manager who is responsible for this position.
Books
• Have a weekly training call • Weekly routines also include finding and updating issues with current processes. • Add a list of common books that need to be read by the team • Institute training so everyone comes to the same level of performance. • Stocks should be looked at in terms of power • Figure out which kinds of tasks are commonly asked and create a pareto chart that can then be used to automate those processes
Books
☐ 7 Powers ☐ Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs ☐ Leaders Eat Last ☑︎ Cable Cowboy ☑︎ Outsiders ☑︎ High Output Management ☑︎ E-myth ☑︎ Working Backwards ☐ Thinking in Bets ☐ Good Profit ☐ Kochland ☐ Never Split the Difference ☑︎ 80/20 Principle ☑︎ The Goal ☐ Science, Steategy, and War ☐ Antifragile