Around the third report a team lead’s job changes. We treated it as a coaching problem, not a ceiling, and our player-coaches learned to run teams of four or five.
An enterprise customer we had built toward for months backed out, late and without warning. The gut punch lasted twenty minutes. What mattered was the next few hours: what we told a team of forty, and in what order. Here is the playbook, and where we went off script.
Over the past 12-18 months, we have established the initial structures for a middle management level within our company. The reason for this was that the number of employees had increased significantly from just under 10 to over 30, which would have resulted in a management depth of around 15 people with only two founders.…