The deadline doom loop - by James Hawkins
Here’s how the loop plays out:
Phase 1: “We’re gonna make it!” 👍
Phase 2: “Are we gonna make it?” 🤷
Phase 3: “We’re not gonna make it!” 🥵
Phase 4: “We (sort of) made it.” 😵💫
Phase 5: “We’re gonna make it this time!” 🙏
Principles for escaping the doom loop
The alternative, an approach that helps us ship faster, relies on a few key principles:
- Small product teams – Ideally, six or fewer. A team of six cracked engineers will ship faster than a team twice its size. Small teams = less coordination, fewer meetings, and more time coding – see The magic of small engineering teams.
- Engineers make product decisions – Product engineers who own product decisions ship faster and better. This approach attracts ambitious, talented engineers with an intrinsic motivation for building great products.
- Trust and feedback over process – Autonomy is more important than control. We expect people to give each other constructive feedback, and be generous with their praise when it’s deserved. Small teams make this easier, too.
Things you need to make this work
- Be clear about what you need from people
… [provide guidance]
How do you know the team are doing this? What process do we implement?
None!
The moment you implement a process to do so, you’re re-creating the doom loop you’re trying to avoid. Resist your urge to “trust, but verify”.
“Trust and feedback over process” is key here. We want our team to push each other on the above.
…
- Set a high bar for hiring
This is vital.
We expect a wider skillset from our engineers than just writing code, so we hire people that have wider skills. This means lots of ex-founders, ex-CTOs that just want to build stuff, and people with more experience.