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
I was watching a Youtube video this week and it talks about a team that was doing a project and had been preparing for weeks.
Then they presented to the upper management and were decimated. Meaning it was completely off target as to what they wanted to see.
The CEO told the team that he was disappointed and that it did not meet his expectations at all. And that they should go back to the drawing board.
And so weeks of work were thrown down the drain.
Have you had this happen to you?
I’ve had this happen to me a few times earlier in my career so I know what it feels like. And i’ve also seen it happen to others many times.
But as I was listening to this person speak it almost felt nostalgic. Kind of as if I was watching a show from the 80’s or 90’s.
Because this shit has literally not happened to me at all in over three years. And in this article I will explain why.
A bit about how I work now
I’m involved in lots of projects. Some of them are client-related, some of them are my own.
But I start projects by creating clickup tasks for everything I plan to do. In those cards I write down the context in detail of why i’m going to do that task and then i write down what the expected output is.
Then I add anyone who is relevant as followers (eg. the CEO, the client, etc) to the card and put in a comment asking them to have a look and feedback on anything they’d like me to change.
Perhaps they don’t even think I should do the task because it’s not a priority or it’s redundant to something that was already done. Good! I want that feedback
But after I give it a day or so and account for any feedback, I consider the task ‘aligned’.
Meaning if you were tagged as a follower than you had your chance to speak up…. but now if I start working on this card i am by default doing something that you agree with.
And if you later disagree… than it is your fault. And not mine.
This part is an absolute GAME CHANGER when you start to realize its power.
This results in getting lots of feedback early on
Rather than spending weeks going in the wrong direction…. I am getting ‘signal’ from my stakeholders on day one after having done not more than perhaps an hour of work.
And as each day goes on and I continue to work on these tasks, I am commenting on them. The stakeholders see these comments because they should be clearing their Clickup notification inbox every couple hours, and the expectation is that they chime in if they are not aligned.
So in essence they are ‘micro-steering’ my work as i do it. Multiple times each day.
They might even propose that I create other new tasks and work on those first. Which I do (assuming i’m aligned).
But the key here is that we are working in lockstep. Each day.
And without it taking up lots of their time or my time. Because we aren’t having meetings to do it.
When we have meetings at key milestones we are pretty much always aligned
Although I try to limit meetings I will do them at critical milestones sometimes to kind of formally present out what was done and align on next steps.
In these meetings, I go in almost completely unstressed these days.
And if someone chimes in that they disagree with something critical that was worked on a couple weeks back.. guess what my response is?
It is usually something like… “Well.. you were following the task and we made that decision two weeks ago. So you either saw it and were aligned, or you missed it. But either way… that ship has sailed and we are moving on.”
But to be honest this pretty much never happens because everyone is clearing their notifications regularly and making sure they are aligned to the decisions that are made.
Working for weeks without any feedback is outright stupid
These days I literally refuse to work on something where the expectation was that I just disappeared for a few weeks and then come back with my findings.
Because I find it to just be stupid and I don’t want to waste my time like that.
You are highly likely to have gone in the wrong direction and made some wrong assumptions. So it’s not worth it.
As a result i’m just very upfront about it… if I’m going to work on something I always tag in the stakeholders right from the start. And work on aligning them pretty much from day one.
A metaphor I like to make is driving a car without any map. Would you start driving down a long, desolate highway without any feedback that you’re going in the right direction?
No… that would that be stupid!! Because if you’re going in the wrong direction than it’s a long way back.
Rather the first thing you’d do is bust out your Google Maps and make sure you’re going the right way.
Achieving this relies on a solid foundation
The ideas i’ve put above here are relatively easy to follow. But what you will find is that making it work depends on a solid foundation.
The ‘foundation’ i’m referring to is the same one I’ve been writing about for months now on this newsletter. Meaning that the whole team needs to be abiding by basic rules like:
- Everything that anyone does that takes more than 20 minutes is represented as a task
- Any work that is done on a task is reflected as a comment or status change
- Everyone in the team needs to clear their Clickup inbox every couple of hours
Without this foundation you will find it next to impossible to achieve what I’ve said above.
Why?
Simple.. the CEO will for example come to the meeting and say.. “Sorry.. I haven’t read any of your notifications from the past few weeks and so I’m not aligned.”
And because of his lack of discipline to the system.. the team ends up throwing weeks of work down the drain.
That system is broken. And the learning that the team will take away is… “Why am I bothering writing all these updates and looping the stakeholders in.. if I am anyway going to come to the meeting and get burned like this?”
The system falls apart fast. And you’re back to the old, highly inefficient way of doing things.. lol
Closing thoughts
Some folks I chat with ask me why I share these ideas and concepts. And I tell them that I think a lot of these ideas will simply be how everyone works in a decade or so.
Some of it sounds strange or extreme today… but i’m pretty confident that in time these ideas will be accepted for the simple reason that they are more effective.
Darwin’s ‘natural selection’ dictates that ideas like these will win over the current way that most teams operate.
And so they ask me… “How do I know?”
And i’m just honest… it’s because I rarely see any teams out there that I think are even close to how effective the teams i’m using these concepts with are.
We’re just playing a different game and moving at different speed.
