3 ms·

> All these engineers were still heads-down, working their tails off, just as they had been doing since the first few months of the company. Too busy working, m

> All these engineers were still heads-down, working their tails off, just as they had been doing since the first few months of the company. Too busy working, most were oblivious to the changes that success and growth had brought to the company. This gets at the vague steps that the author mentions at the end about supporting transitions of _people_, but I was waiting for them to get concrete about how the engineers should have _positively_ been made aware of the success and growth. Pay raises to market rate? A bonus? I’m guessing that in actuality, it was little more than verbal pats on the back. I guess it’s different for each company culture, but this makes it sound like the engineers worked hard, the company got solid, things were taken away, and then the superstars started to leave. I’ve seen similar patterns a few times. What are some positive ways that people have seen these patterns fought?

ftlio 4y ago
Based on how I've seen it mismanaged, the only way I see it working is hiring "provisional VPs". In the same way that you might have hired slow and fired fast in the beginning for competent ICs, you need to do the same with the now executive management skillset that's required to break off and scale whole divisions of the working organization. The other side of that is you need to equip them with the actual subset of the talent they need, and not hold back some employees who were there in the beginning for special considerations. The ICs have been there for years, knife fighting with the market and the competition, and then someone comes in from some adjacent market or some other vertical entirely, and the expectation is that all the work done to go from zero to one needs to be fit to their agenda, and not the other way around. Everyone who has lived it knows its backwards, and yet I've seen the trigger get pulled on this so slow that it had a measurable effect on the exit.

ftlio 4y ago

Based on how I've seen it mismanaged, the only way I see it working is hiring "provisional VPs". In the same way that you might have hired slow and fired fast in the beginning for competent ICs, you need to do the same with the now executive management skillset that's required to break off and scale whole divisions of the working organization. The other side of that is you need to equip them with the actual subset of the talent they need, and not hold back some employees who were there in the beginning for special considerations. The ICs have been there for years, knife fighting with the market and the competition, and then someone comes in from some adjacent market or some other vertical entirely, and the expectation is that all the work done to go from zero to one needs to be fit to their agenda, and not the other way around. Everyone who has lived it knows its backwards, and yet I've seen the trigger get pulled on this so slow that it had a measurable effect on the exit.