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
The backdrop
I was talking to a PM friend and he was complaining that he feels like he spends a lot of time updating others.
He updates his manager in regular 1-on-1’s.
He updates business stakeholders.
He update his engineering team on things that were discussed with business.
He updates the wider product team on what he’s up to in order to get input.
He updates the senior leadership team during quarterly planning.
Updates.
Updates.
And more updates.
I agree… updates suck
I created updates for years. Especially as a product manager… you repeat the same stuff a ton of times.
And produce a lot of artifacts that say essentially the same thing.
When I was a product leader back from 2015 – 2019 I’d just grown accustomed to it.
You just kinda knew that about half your time would be spent on actually analyzing and producing new stuff (eg. building). And the rest of the time would be spent updating others about it.
And you got so used to it that you just assumed its normal.
But now in hindsight… I see it for what it is.
It simply sucked.
It is a very shitty, inefficient way of working.
These days I spend almost zero time creating updates
Now you probably hear that and are writing it off to various excuses.
“Ken probably doesn’t manage as much as I do.”
“What Ken is doing is completely different to what I do.”
etc.
And what I can say is.. that yes what I do may differ a bit. But i’ve used my approach on lots of different stuff.. and it works pretty much the same across the board:
- I’ve built software with traditional engineering teams using my approach.
- I’ve built no code software using Bubble devs.
- I’ve built content like Youtube and Tiktok channels with creators.
- I’ve managed commercial folks that do b2b sales.
- I’ve managed marketing folks running campaigns.
- You name it.. and if it’s a core part of creating a venture.. i’ve probably done it.
And the system I use yields pretty much similar results across the board. In fact better and better as I’ve honed it over time.
When you work like this you don’t create artifacts for updating others and thus almost no time is wasted on this activity.
So how do I do this?
First, as many of you know I’m a Clickup fanatic. Everything my team does is on Clickup.
My rule is if it takes at least ten minutes to do than there should be a Clickup task behind it.
Right now I have about 15 freelancers working on my latest project. And as mentioned in my post last week: I don’t do team meetings, I don’t do 1-on-1’s, I barely even know the folks I work with.
And I consider that a good thing. LOL
Rather I just create tasks and assign them to folks. Then I respond to their comments and track as the task evolves to its completion.
All ‘updates’ are done as comments on the Clickup cards. Fast one or two liners that literally take like 10-20 seconds to write out typically.
And then anyone who is interested in that card is added as a follower so that they see it too. If they have questions about it, they ask in the comments.
If somebody asks me for an update on something… I just send them the Clickup card. And they read the comment history.
This typically ends up being a much higher quality answer than if I typed something out on Slack because they can quickly read through the history:
- What did we do when?
- Why did we take the decisions we took?
We are 100% transparent. Anyone in the company can read any card. And every card is written simple enough such that anyone in the company would understand it.
Why I highly recommend this?
I cannot begin to explain how much this changes the efficiency and even morale of a team or entire company.
I’ve implemented this in client teams at least 5-6x the past few years and have created and run several startups/side hustles using it. And it consistently delivers. Even more so as I tweak and improve it.
In fact i’ve done it enough times to feel confident to even make a pretty aggressive statement:
I think I could at least 2x the efficiency (output) of pretty much ANY team with this. And more than double the transprency that everyone has.
Of course there would need to be some conditions like… i’d need to have the leverage to ensure the team follows the system (which is the hardest part at the beginning).
And I don’t say that to brag.. achieving this is not even really a function of ‘me’.
Its a function of the system, which is just superior to the traditional way of working. As it removes most of the friction involved in managing and coordination.
I like to say “it gets your team working like clockwork.”
Wanna test this out on your team? If you’re interested in some help… signup for a discovery call (calendly) and let’s chat.
