I went for a bike ride Saturday and here are some ideas that bounced around during a cold morning. I like riding and running as it gives me a chance to think. Since I am changing roles again, I had a chance to reflect about working for small companies and startups.
I am leaving Syzygy basically last week but officially mid-February. I am excited about working with Rheom Materials and building out the team and company as we did in the early days of Syzygy. The opportunity is great, but I was thinking about the lessons I learned and things that I would do again. To make it more "catchy," I stuck with aligning things to the letter "C" as an homage to the Sesame Street skit.
Communication - tell people what is going on and share information that would help guide people as they make their day-to-day decisions. Message in a way that brings insights. I struggle to remind myself to bring the bottom-line up front (BLUF) Tell people what is important, why you think that, and what implication that has. Don't get into the details until someone asks for the deep dive on your conclusion.
Commitment - Work to make the change you want happen, stay focused stay disciplined, find the motivation, be the urgency. I like to remind myself that if something were easy it would already have happened. Easy things don't make you better, bleeding and sweating are just weakness leaving the body.
Challenge - envision audacious things and devote your time to make these things happen. Changing the world is hard, making a difference is hard. Peloton wisdom helps me here with some pithy sayings like "we didn't come this far to only come this far" - Suzy Chan
Customer Centric - Focus what the end customer needs and solve their problem not the one that you think is cool, doable, or interesting to you. Work as a cross functional team frame the problem so that everyone contributes to defining what has to be done and identify the outcome that is needed to solve customer and market problems. Envision the details of what is necessary to achieve that outcome.
I like the Amazon Press Release method to help align on what is the right thing to do by envisioning the future state of what you would like to tell the world once it is done.
Criteria - the definition of "criteria" is a principle or standard by which something may be judged or decided.
What are the measures and metrics that will drive the product in the right direction. Figure out the details of what goes into the calculation the criteria and ruthlessly work to drive towards excellence.
Elon Musk believes that innovation was driven by setting clear metrics, such as cost per ton lifted into orbit or average number of miles driven on Autopilot without human intervention. For machine-learning systems generally need a goal or metric that guides them as they train themselves. Musk, who liked to manage by decreeing what metrics should be paramount, gave them their lodestar: the number of miles that cars with Tesla Full Self-Driving were able to travel without a human intervening. “I want the latest data on miles per intervention to be the starting slide at each of our meetings,” he decreed. “If we’re training AI, what do we optimize? The answer is higher miles between interventions.” He told them to make it like a video game where they could see their score every day. “Video games without a score are boring, so it will be motivating to watch each day as the miles per intervention increases.”
Likely there are some edits coming to this, but I wanted to get something written so that I can think about it further and comeback to reevaluate.
Comments