Field Notes
What twenty years inside scaling companies keeps teaching us. Written up as we go.
The work trace: follow one piece of work through your company
The fastest diagnostic we know: reconstruct one finished piece of work end-to-end and count what actually happened to it.
Read →Why hiring should be the last step of design, not the first response to pain
Reaching for headcount when a growing company hurts is the most expensive way to postpone the actual problem.
Read →Too much process or too little structure: the two ways growing companies fail
Companies break in one of two directions — bureaucracy or chaos — and each one is usually a panicked reaction to the other.
Read →The decision audit: trace your last ten significant decisions
List your last ten real decisions, and the org chart usually stops being true.
Read →Why founders become the routing layer, even in companies that swear they're not hierarchical
Hundreds of small, individually reasonable defaults add up to a bottleneck nobody chose on purpose.
Read →"We need a senior marketer" is not a role. Here's what one actually looks like
Before a job posting goes out, we write four things down. Most job specs skip the two that matter most.
Read →The removal test: how to tell which of your rules are actually load-bearing
Stop requiring one report or sign-off for two weeks and watch what actually happens.
Read →Designing a founding team before there's a company to hire into
Most founding teams get assembled by who's available and willing, not by what the idea actually requires.
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