Geoff Charles: recommendation

Transcript context

…How do you, as a leader, avoid distracting them knowing there's so many things you need to do and there's constantly this like, "Oh, if we just fix this one bug, this one customer is going to be so happy," and, "Okay, if I just ask this one PM to work on this for a day?" I know there's not going to be like, "Here's the rule of step one, two, three, but how do you actually approach shielding teams from things that just are constantly on fire? So, for example, on bugs or issues like that, we have individuals that are protecting those teams from those issues. So we have a rotational program on production engineering, for example, where engineers are protecting the core team from escalations, from bugs, from issues. We have product operators that are protecting the PM from the chaos that is documentation and escalations and release management and enablement customer requests. So we have layers of protective tissue to core teams, but I would say for any of these big bets, you basically have to pull folks from different teams and reorganize a sub-team. And that team typically doesn't have responsibility on any existing product because these are all fairly new products. I think it gets more challenging when you go from one to two rather than zero to one. You also mentioned this idea of lofty goals and that's something I've seen a lot. At Airbnb, there was a ... It is very known for lofty goals. Brian was famous for going to meetings where people present their goals and their plans and he's like, "How do we 10X that? What do you need in order to 10X that goal?" And then that ends up being your goal and often works shockingly, sometimes burnt a lot of people out. How do you think about for just finding that balance and, I don't know, is there an example of just like, "Here's a really ambitious goal?" Or maybe the question is just, how do you find the balance of ambitious but not just impossible?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.