Keith Coleman: belief

Transcript context

…It probably has to be someone very senior, not [inaudible 00:43:05] manager. Someone senior who can make the decisions you need made, whatever they are. I think that's really important, that clear decision-making structure. Another was 100% focus, so everyone on the project is expected to be totally focused on it. A lot of companies, it can be easy to have people's attention spread across a bunch of things, and it makes it hard to get stuff done. You'll talk to whoever that person is, you'll ask them for help on something, and they'll be like, "Yeah, I'll help you. I got to finish this thing, and it'll take me a week or two and then I'll get to it." A week or two delay totally changes the momentum of a project. When we were 100% focused, we talk in the morning, it's like, "Hey, Jay. Why don't we try this thing in the algorithm?" He's like, "Yeah." Then that afternoon or the next day, we're looking at results. Because of that total focus, the rate of iteration goes way up. Then beyond that, there was also just the ability to use whatever our own decision-making process was. We didn't need to write OKRs or... For others standard practices. Obviously, we had to make sure we were responsibly building the product and everything, but we didn't need to use the standard practices. I think that's another great example, OKRs, I understand why they can be helpful, but they can also be not necessarily the right cadence at which to set goals. I think it's really unclear that quarterly or annual goals are actually the right pace. We would set the goal for the next milestone that mattered, and we would work on that. We reached that milestone, we would have an idea of what was coming after, and then when we hit that, we'd set the next milestone. Whether that was two weeks, a month, three months, whatever it was. We set our own pace and goals at that pace, and that just I think is a lot more natural for the development of something. The whole OKR determination and planning process took longer than it would take us to pick a goal and then execute on it and finish it.…

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