Let Go and Haul: process is a sports bra
Week 26, 2018 – Brooklyn
Welcome to all the new folks on this email! I started this to feel more connected, to give back to my community, and to experiment something I couldn’t find much of on the internet – accounts by women leaders that sounded… real, or even just existed at all, so I’m trying to write what I wanted to be reading. The format of this “logbook” is always the same: journey, journal, jams.
Journey: where we’re at
It’s the end of Q2 and I’m so happy that we managed to hit all our objectives (or they are extremely close to being completed). It was a very ambitious quarter, and if we hand’t been able to get the raise done in the time we had it would have seriously put the rest of our OKRs in jeopardy. Whew just made it! *wipes brow*. Some these things include the beginning of our music strategy, our video ontology strategy and real infrastructure living in the cloud now. Sick.
Journal: what I learned
I’ve spent my whole career learning to fit in with gambling metaphors and sportball metaphors, so you know what? Y'all can listen to what I equate good process to: a sports bra – because when you start running fast, you’re going to need it to hold that shit together. If you don’t, you’re just gonna be all over the place. (I barely even have any boobs and I own at least five of these garments. It’s necessary, folks).
If this makes you laugh instead of groan the next time someone says “process” to you then my work here is done.
But seriously, the reason we need process is for speed. Everything about a start up is a race against time. It’s possible to make things without a lot of process, but it’s going to be messy and take longer.
This is why I’ve been spending a lot of time on our process over the month of June. We’re ramping up our speed, and by the end of August I want us to be running at optimum speed. I’m a huge fan of “The First 90 Days” and the philosophy that it takes a new hire 90 days to reach “break even” where they are now contributing more than they are taking from the organization. The book is focused on “accelerating your learning” so that you can reach that break even moment as quickly as possible. Given what I’ve seen growing teams (and having to throw out process when it breaks and build new), it takes a team about 90 days to reach a “break even” point with each other too. Right now our “sprints” are more like jogs. Each week I see us get better and faster. In demo/retro on Friday (we do this every Friday night), we collectively started to feel the momentum which is awesome but we still have much work to do there.
Three things I learned this week on process (note: this is some pretty specific seriously nerdy shit but I have a way less nerdy more fun personal thing at the bottom + music) 🤓➡️😎
1. Standups ☕️
The daily morning meeting. I’ve encountered more flavors of standup than Fenty foundation shades in my career. Some have been a great match for the needs of the company and others have been terrible. There is something meaningful about connecting with your colleagues in the morning and having the ritual of stating what you’re going to tackle, but there are many things about standups that often suck, for example:
it becomes a crutch, where teams wait 24h before stating blocks (f no!)
it’s boring as all hell because listening to status updates is the worst
it’s impossible for everyone to get to on time cuz MTA
it doesn’t work with everyone’s personal creative zone / work style
it sucks for remote workers
it takes too much time / rabbit holes into a million things
[insert all the things you have hated about standups here]
We have the chance right now to build good habits with a clean slate, so I’m keen to get this right. I sought feedback from my friend Matthew who is very good at managing remote engineering teams, as well as my friend Karina who’s a team coach that I worked with at Twitter. I came to the conclusion that the ritual is helpful, but the questions inherent to stand up are not. I don’t care about what you did yesterday unless it didn’t get done, and then I’m curious to know why. I don’t really care about what you’re doing today either. I care about why you’re doing it. Is it a priority? I care about if there’s something gnarly in it we need to get in front of. I care if it’s going to touch other people’s work and what events may cascade from that. I think the big problem with standup is it asks the question what when it really should be asking why. I also think it’s just really nice for people to break in the day with each other over a ritualistic conversation so you don’t have to think too hard about how to rev up your engine.
On Monday we brainstormed some questions that we might like to answer. We’re going to keep experimenting with this format and figure out what the most meaningful prompts are for us.
2. Product management in Github 😩
Omg square peg round hole. But, developers love Github (I include myself in this), plus we have an open source component, so this makes sense. Last week I asked for help with this and so many people responded! Thank you so much! I got some great tips, experimented with a few frameworks and ended up doing a call with my friend Ben who had this exact same problem when he was managing product on Github at Docker. Useful tips from Ben that are starting to ease my pain / things I learned:
Milestones not super useful, can’t work cross repos
Labels very useful, esp for prioritization because drag to reorder on Github fml
Grouping issues to a master issue (epic) p useful
Have just one “project” board for the weekly sprint
Put the quarterly goals right next to the weekly sprint project so the longer term mission is highly visible
Basically this:
3. Reviewing process 👀
We review our process every Friday in retro and give ourselves the opportunity to throw it out if we don’t like it. This makes “trying on new sports bras” not so intimidating or scary (like oh god am I going to have to be stuck with that one I hate that’s got the itchy straps forever noooooo) because we treat nothing as precious, and are willing to throw out what’s not working every week. At the same time, it’s important to remember it takes 90 days to reach that fast clip and as Anton pointed out to me the other week, if we are constantly experimenting it’s hard to master anything. To master things you need to do them over and over. Wise Anton!
On that note, I felt like digging back into “The Creative Habit” by choreographer Twyla Tharp today at the beach, (recommended to me years ago by my sister Sophie who is a dancer). June has been a serious transition month from me, going from an intense frenetic state of fundraising to getting back into the flow of creative work. Nobody seems to talk about how difficult this is. I thought I’d be able to bounce back to my product brain overnight and nooooooo. I had to re-remember how to be my creative self again. I had to go back to my habits, my rituals, the things that give me creative energy. I had to remember how to critique my world again (something you simply cannot allow yourself to do in the middle of a sales process), and a million other things so that I could turn off the many operations channels that were cycling through my brain and turn up the brightness and contrast on the one that had been neglected, and then actually focus on that channel. This is extremely difficult. Every day, operations threaten to eat all my time, I’ve been struggling to find my “deep design” hours and not just let that channel turn into static. I’m not sure I have any answers here yet except that switching work modes is way more difficult than it looks and I really haven’t heard anyone talk about this, so I thought I would. Sometimes my brain feels like this:
Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits, which are grounded in ritual says Twyla. She gets up every morning at 5:30 to go to the gym in Manhattan and talks about her ritual of taking a cab there, because once she is in the cab there is no going back. The gym is the habit but the cab is the ritual that reinforces the habit.
It’s been making me re-think a lot of my own creative rituals, our team rituals and whether we should be just be calling “process” “habit”? I believe that the specificity of certain language is extremely important. Deliberately choosing to use a term over a culturally accepted word in our every day can be everything from a small act of rebellion to a mark of wokeness. So, since the word process makes us all think of snooze fest TPS reports (or maybe now sports bras lol), I wonder if we should just be thinking of it as habit. The same way I never want to work in an “office”, In my head, I always work in a “studio”. A studio is where creativity flourishes and an office is often where it goes to die.
Jams: what I’m into
For the new folks who just joined, I make a monthly playlist called SISTERS that’s at least 50% women artists and (more or less) new releases from the month. If you like hip hop, RnB and electronic music you might be into it. (All my music links are in Spotify rn FYI and I realize this is a compatibility issue. If anyone wants to buy me an Apple Music subscription we can fix this haha)
Other stuff. One of the best things in life is listening to new albums with friends and I got to start dissecting Scorpion with my friend David yesterday. So Drake is the nicest fuckboi that ever existed because he has Many Feelings but let’s be clear he is still a fuckboi. (Thank you for this insight Cara). I can be okay with that because his music speaks to me with its hustle, ambition and leadership. The samples in this album are off the chain, I found the melodies a little disappointing. It’s interesting to see the trap sound recede for a more sparse dirty south #mood. I am v into this, and it’s also why I’m obsessed with Valee’s Womp Womp and ahhhh I got to see him at the Warm Up on Saturday and that concert is absolutely one of the best things about living in NYC.
The Womp Womp video has fun old DVD fx. (If you doubted the 90s were back this summer they are 100% here so put on your tiny glasses and watch this):
Also, omg the new Chaka Khan video is so beautiful and inspiring. Hat tip to Prince William for putting this in my DMs.