This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Now Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage startups with content and traction called End Game.
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
“It’s a lot harder for politics to influence a decision when it’s on a written thread”
So this is one of my biggest learnings from operating the last few years using Clickup tasks to basically reflect all the work that me and the teams I work on do.
A classic situation a decade or so back when I was in the corporate world was something like this…
1- setup a meeting with a stakeholder
2- align on a course of action, that perhaps they begrudgingly agreed to
3- in implementing the action they might not do their part or do it poorly. Often claiming that they are busy, etc.
4- i would need to remind them either in-person or through direct messages (eg. Slack)
5- if they didn’t rectify… we would need to escalate and politics would ensue
This almost never happens on a Clickup task thread. Why?
Because on Clickup you add the key stakeholders as followers, layout what the action is, and then updates come as written comments.
These comments have clear time stamps.
And so if a person sits on their tasks without doing them.. it is extremely clear from the history of the task. And they know that the other stakeholders are getting these updates.
The transparency ends up being embarrassing to them. Especially when I make comments like.. “Hey.. it’s been 3 days… when can i get an update?”
And I absolutely love this effect.
It actually ends up keeping relationships healthier in my experience. Because the strategy of silently trying to kill an initiative becomes untenable.
If you operate like this for awhile as i have… you realize just how broken the old way is.
