Timothy Davis: prediction

Transcript context

…I love that. In terms of how this team grows, you mentioned when we were chatting, that you wait for someone to cry uncle, to hire more and to add to the team to kind of avoid bloat. Talk about that. Unfortunately, we've seen a lot in the news lately with a lot of tech companies letting go of some really talented people, and that is, I feel like just created bloated organizations. We, every month, my current manager, Dean, created this calculator that we look at that says, "How much time are you spending in meetings?" If you have any PTO coming up, put that in there. Optimizations, reporting, stuff like that to basically add up to how many days are in the quarter? Because every quarter... Well, not every quarter, but most quarters you'll have vacation, or you'll have, say, what we call a Shopify burst, where it's we meet in real life to get shit done in real life as opposed to remotely. Put all that in there, and then what does the number equate to? Oh, we're in the red right now for these two to five people. How many quarters has it been that way? Okay, it's only this quarter. This quarter, we have a summit coming up, or we have a burst coming up, or we have a lot of travel because we're meeting with partners, so on and so forth. So maybe this is an isolated thing, let's go ahead and wait till next quarter. All right, next quarter, it's red again. All right, now maybe we need to start having the conversation of, what this new hire will take over, what they will be responsible for, and how much work they'll be taking on and doing, to replace some of this red that is going on. And if it equates to a full head, great, we can move forward, we've made our business case. But sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes we're just red, and we need to do a better job of making sure, "Hey, we need to step out of these meetings. These meetings are sucking out our time and we don't need to be a part of it." Or, "This launch, we don't need to be a part of. We just need to be consulted on it. We don't need to be in every single meeting every single time, or every single communication." So just making sure we're looking at the right things before we decide to hire someone and making- Just making sure we're looking at the right things before we decide to hire someone and making sure that we have stuff for them to do. And red means they have more work?…

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