Manage xor Do
In short, managing is about focusing on this quarter, while doing is about focusing on right now.
The Humble Beginnings of Every Startup
As with the beginning of every startup, there are a whole lot of chiefs and not very many indians. Typically, each founder (usually about 2-4 founder per company) inherits a Chief [something] Officer role, which they then carry forward with them if the company is lucky enough to scale.
These executives are the supreme manager for whatever domain of the company they are responsible for, with the CEO being the manager of the managers and therefore of the whole company. Product is too buggy? Chew the ear off the CTO. Salespeople aren’t getting it done? Better have a serious chat with the CMO. Barely holding the company together while making progress on product? Actually that’s pretty much par for the course for the CEO.
Takeaway: in large organizations the success or failure of CXOs rests on the output of the people in the organization doing the actual work.
What happens when there are no people to do any of the work you are responsible for managing? I guess you could write reports chronicling the lack of progress and the reason(s) for it... presumably the fact that by definition there is nobody to do any actual work.
Of course early on in a startups life, all the work is done by the so-called CXOs. The CTO is doing all or most of the dev work, a CPO is responsible for designing product, and the CEO often does sales, customer support, fundraising, and any high priority work that’s nobody’s responsibility. Early on all the managers are the workers, so who is doing the managing?
Well what do we mean when we say manage? In this context, I mean effectively directing the actual work being done towards the larger objective of the organization and deciding what tradeoffs will be made and when.
So you have managers and you have workers, so what? Well, in my experience its very hard to manage and do at the same time. That’s not a problem in an organization with many people, because you have some people managing, and others doing. However early on at your startup, you have to do both.
The Struggle: Have I made any progress today?
Why is it so hard to manage and do at once? Sometimes I find myself at my computer for hours on end trying jumping back and forth between managing progress and making progress. At the end of the day I realize I haven't done much of either. Wasted days are not good for my mental health.
In my view, the root of the problem is that the focus of the managing and doing are opposite.
Management is about achieving a large, long-term objective. You have to constantly be aware of how each small project is progressing and how each project impacts the large, long term goal. As such a constant holistic view of a company is necessary at all times. Managing is about optimizing for the accomplishment of one large objective over weeks and months.
Doing work is the opposite. Work is about focusing intensely on one short-term problem at a time. You have to constantly ignore everything around you other than the one problem you're working on and achieving that short term goal. Doing work is about optimizing for the accomplishment of many small objectives over hours and days.
It takes time to shift your thinking from short-term to long-term and vice versa. When you're coding a feature, every time you reconsider some of the feature requirements, it takes an extra half hour just to catch up again to the code progress you've made so far.
In short, managing is about focusing on this quarter, while doing is about focusing on right now.
Dedicate Time for Both
So what do you do when you’re both the worker and the manager? I'm guessing the only way to be effective at both is to separate the two completely, and define when you’ll be doing each. For me, that means every Friday is dedicated to managing: planning my next week, evaluating my performance in the previous week, and tracking our startup’s progress against our long term goals. Every other day of the week, is for focusing on the work that I set out for myself the previous Friday.
I imagine it will take some time getting used to this system. However, I can’t continue to be wasting time jumping back and forth from managing things to doing things and getting less done than I expect of myself.
I’ll update in a month and with some preliminary results :)