Komoroske: Teams should spend 70% of their bandwidth on legible work
Alex Komoroske · Thinking like a gardener, slime mold, the adjacent possible: Product advice from Alex Komoroske · Oct 3, 2024 · at 36:11
Former Google director and Stripe corporate strategy head Alex Komoroske explains his operational heuristic for protecting high-variance bottom-up initiatives within large organizations.
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“Typically what I would advise for PM's approach at Google was, 70% of my effort and my team's effort should go on things that everybody acknowledges are important and useful and create value. Maybe it's boring linear value, but some kind of value. You're trying to minimize the chance that any other person in a company will say, what does that team do anyway? This, if someone says this about your team is on the verge of death. So you're trying to minimize the chance that anybody wants to say that or thinks that it's appropriate to say that by clearly and unambiguously adding value. You aren't saying this is the best team in the entire world, but clearly they're doing something useful. They're executing well. They're working hard. And like, of course that team should exist. I don't think about it. Of course they should. But now once you do this, you have like 30% of your extra time that you can plant all these seeds.”
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