Farhan Thawar: preference

Transcript context

…120 direct reports feels like a complete nightmare to me. Tell me why you decided to do that, if you'd recommend that for other people. Yeah, so what ended up happening there was we started off small. It was 10 people. When I got to XtremeLabs, I wasn't the founder, but I was very early on and I just had everyone report to me. And then as we grew, I just kept having those people report to me and I was trying to figure out, we talked about crafters and crafters paradise, this idea of people don't really... Their managers are useful, but I was trying to figure out could I solve the problems that they needed their manager for in other ways? So for example, what should I be working on? I was like, "Okay, well, we have product backlogs" or "I'm blocked on something," or "I need feedback on the product I'm building," or "I'm stuck on this technical problem." I tried to figure out ways to not have managers be the answers to those questions. I'm like, "There should be another answer." And so pair programming really helps you get unblocked quickly because you have another person that you can bounce technical ideas off of. Having a product backlog can tell you what to work on. We had demos every week, demos internally, and then we had demos with the clients every week because we were a contract manufacturing for mobile. That gave them feedback on whether they were going in the right direction. We had set working hours, which made things super intense in the office. This is again like 2009 to 2013. So all these things didn't really need a manager. And what I realized was what the unblocking thing needed a manager. I'm blocked on this. Well, I said, okay, if... I had all these directors. I did two things famously. One, I had a lot of direct reports, and two, I did not do any scheduled one-on-ones because you can't have 120 direct reports and do a scheduled one-on-ones because you're never doing anything but one-on-ones. So I said, "I'm going to be around a lot because I don't have a lot of one-on-ones. So we can do unscheduled one-on-ones." And what that means is if you are blocked, actually there's a famous picture where I had this weird cube desk where it was like a circle almost in the middle of the whole floor of engineers. And I was always there because I wasn't in a lot of meetings and people that were blocked, they could just come up to me. Actually, one cool thing about pair programming IRL is you can look across and just see if it's working or not. Because if two people are intensely on the computer, you know it's working. If one person is laying back or you're like, "It's not working," so you can just walk up to- It's working if one person is laying back or you're like, it's not working. So you could just walk up to them and be like, "What's happening?" But they would come and ask me questions and I can unlock them. Like, hey, we're blocked on this. We don't have this API. We need money for this machine, whatever. And so the unscheduled one-on-ones ended up being a real clarifying thing for me. I can unlock them. Like, hey, we're blocked on this. We don't have this API. We need money for this machine, whatever. And so the unscheduled one-on-ones ended up being a real clarifying thing for me. Because I did scheduled one-on-ones my whole career and I realized after leaving Microsoft for three years, I'm like, where are all those one-on-ones useful once a week for three years, right? A hundred and fifty one-on-ones. So the unscheduled ones were, though. I was like, when I knocked on my manager's door and said, "I have this problem, those were important." So that's what I created at Xtreme. And the 120 directors, it just grew over time. I just didn't think I needed managers. So I was like, let me unblock these people on another way. And we came up with other things to systems to unblock them that didn't require a manager. And I just also had a good memory. I knew exactly everyone's skills and compensation. I knew all that off the top of my head, so that helps. The thing that I broke was actually, this is Chamath. He came in and became our biggest investors. He's obviously is a smart guy, but he said the right thing, which is not, this can never work, because then I would go into defense mode and explain to him why it would work. He just said to me, I'm not going to debate with you whether this works or not, but will it work at 400 people? And I said, probably not. He said, okay, so let's change it. And so we did then ended up putting a little bit more of a structure, but I made a few people directors and I forced them to have 40 direct reports each. I said, we're just going to make it still pretty flat. And then that did end up working, because it still allowed them to use the system to unblock people versus having to do a one-on-one every week, or having to talk about things that potentially a system could unblock. And so I tried to figure out ways to systematize things.…

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