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
So Ken’s test is more hypothetical than it is real. But it’s something that I’ve mentioned several times in conversations with folks.
And so it ‘feels’ a bit real to me.. lol
The theoretical test is simple…. you stop everyone in your team on Friday evening before they leave for the weekend and you ask them to document every “productive output” they generated over the course of the week.
Then you also ask them to allocate an approximate amount of time that they spent on it. And you sense check this number to ensure it makes sense.
Now if you are running a team using ‘traditional’ methods… you would likely have an average total not higher than 10 hours per person.
This despite the fact that you’re paying them for 40 hours as full-time employees.
Why is this?
What is a better way?
Let’s dive in.
First let’s define what “productive outputs” are
This is a very important definition to get right in order to do my test correctly. Because without a proper definition people actually WILL be able to document 30+ or even 40+ hours of their week.
They will tell you about all the meetings they were in.
They will tell you updates that they wrote up.
etc. etc.
But I do not consider any of this to be “productive outputs”.
For me a productive output is when you do something that actually moves a project or objective forward. It could be writing up a document, writing code, designing something, creating an ad campaign, etc.
But telling people about it or listening to other people talk about their stuff… no. To me that is mostly a waste of time.
And I will explain why.
Non-Productive Outputs
For me everything that does not directly move a project forward is a non-productive output. Let’s go through a couple examples:
Example 1: 90% of the time spent in most meetings
Why? Because you could have done it all asynchronously and spent probably 10% of the amount of time. Plus it would have probably resulted in a better outcome.
Example 2: Updates, both written and verbal
Writing up lengthy updates or emails is to me a complete waste of time. As well as meetings where you are updating others.
And I will explain why I view it so in this next section.
So how do you operate without these non-productive outputs?
Well, you need a system. And most systems will not cut it.
But mine does.. lol
With the Clickup-based system I use, we have two simple rules that I’ve mentioned in the past:
Rule 1: All work in the company is represented as a Clickup task.
If it’s not a Clickup task than my rule is that it does not exist and should not be done.
Rule 2: Any work you do during the week needs to be represented as an update (eg. comment, status update, etc) to a task.
If you didn’t update the task, the assumption is you did nothing.
Realizations when you operate by these two rules
Realization 1: As a manager… by following all the Clickup tasks that are relevant to you, you have a far better update than any ‘traditional’ update that is written up for you.
Because you get it almost real-time and you have the full context of that task in the card description and comment history.
Plus you can respond. So the communication is two-way and can be several times per day. Which is far better than for example a weekly update meeting.
Realization 2: Aligning on decisions asynchronously via tasks is typically more effective than a meeting.
Why? Because in written form the result is less swayed by who is loudest, most senior, etc.
Each person has a chance to provide many more inputs and think it through much better. So what they contribute is much more crisp than what they’d contribute in a free flowing discussion.
The quality of the discussion just tends to be much higher and you can allow the task to collect inputs for several days.
On average each person will have spent significantly less time consuming information in this way than in a meeting. In part because they don’t actually have to read everything. They can skim and skimming is very fast.
Removing all these non-productive outputs saves a TON OF CASH
If a person can only tally up 10 hours of productive outputs for the week than in my book they are being utilized at 25% (=10hrs / 40hrs) capacity. I like to call this your ‘spend efficiency’ ratio.
This means that if you’re the VC that invested in this company… it is as if they lit 75% of your investment on fire.
In contrast I will generally target 90%+ ‘spend efficiency’ in my teams.
How is that possible? Well think about it….
Everything is a task and pretty much all tasks associate themselves to an objective.
Therefore it is very hard for a person to waste time on things that are not an objective.
Furthermore, since I use mainly contractors… I really only pay for objectives that are completed. Because in Upwork, for example, I can define an objective and set a price on it.
Examples of objectives I define in Upwork could be things like coding something, writing an article, making a video, creating an ad, etc.
And if i’m not happy with the quality level I ask them to fix it. But this extra time investment is on their dime… not mine.
And that is a LOT of savings… trust me.
Spend Efficiency: 90% (the future you) vs. 25% (the current you)
If you run your team the way I’ve described above you also can achieve spend efficiency ratios approaching 90% with enough practice.
Does it mean some people will work much harder? Yes.
But more importantly everyone will work more efficiently.
Does it mean that likely some positions will move from being employees to freelancers? Yes.
Does that mean a decline in the quality of work?
Not if you know how to vet and manage freelancers well. This is the other key skill you need to develop.
But think of what you win… I am basically saying that you will achieve whatever you are achieving today with about a quarter of the spend.
And that sounds crazy!
But having seen what I have seen in the last few years I’m actually pretty confident its roughly accurate.
