Extreme Accountability Helps You Scale
By Sydney Liu
I run a team of 7, leading a site that has hundreds and thousands of users. Without operating at an extremely high level, there is no way for such a small team to manage all the projects that we do and the userbase that we have!
We've found consistent feedback, relentless focus, and extreme accountability to be the best repeatable processes. On the feedback side of things, if there are small things that can be improved, we make it part of our culture to always share it. We add regular feedback sessions in our events automatically so that it is part of the culture and feedback isn't scary! For focus, we talk regularly about our core goals and only work on things that actually push the goals forward. It's hard to operate well when you have too many things that don't matter going on.
And finally, extreme accountability means if you say you're going to do something, you're going to do it! We have public action trackers to track everything that people say they're going to do in the company. We check in regularly to make sure that people actually do what they say they're going to do. Dropping balls is not acceptable, and every time a ball is dropped, we dig in aggressively to make sure it never happens again!
This is really important at a small scale because these problems get amplified when teams get bigger! Managing this really well at small scales allows you to scale up knowing that people will do what they say they're going to do.
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