How To Spend Your Time as a Leader
Open up your schedule, get your team in sync, and focus on building.
In the fall of 2015, when I incorporated Albert, my cofounder and I were the only employees at the company we just started. With an empty calendar, I spent all of my time building.
Once we launched our product, onboarded customers, and hired employees, my schedule filled up with internal and external meetings. I could not think clearly or lead effectively.
Founders and leaders often say that the best times at a company are the early days, in large part because their schedule was open on day 1. But this thinking is backwards. You should be more productive as the company grows. When your company is tiny, you have to do everything yourself, from running payroll to restocking toilet paper. As you grow, you have resources and leverage to do more. But you must fight the urge to meet; you must keep an open schedule.
What actually matters
As a leader, you have to build a great team. Once you've built a team, you have 3 jobs:
- Getting the team rowing in the same direction
- Knowing how things are actually going
- Contributing to the work product
Rowing in the same direction
Make sure everyone knows what they should be doing. You can do this with weekly planning, clear documentation, and frequent asynchronous updates. I wrote about practical ways that small teams can build big things.
Know how things are going
Measure how things are actually going with data. Track every experiment carefully. Build dashboards for every feature and release. Provide transparent metrics to your entire organization with how every experiment is going. Transparency creates buy in.
Do the work
The best leaders lead by example. Find time to contribute in your area of genius. Your team will be inspired by watching you work. Depending on your core competence, this can be R&D on a new product, building a feature, unblocking engineers and designers with architecture or design reviews, writing new ads, making sales calls, and much more. Do the work.
This is my Github activity in the tenth year of running Albert. I love writing software. Why would I stop doing the thing I love just because my company is big?
My calendar
Over a nearly a decade of building and running Albert, I've developed a schedule that allows me to do the three things above. Here's my actual calendar:
