Management

Getting work done through other people — setting expectations, removing obstacles, giving feedback and holding accountability.

Example

A founder who stops writing code and starts making sure four engineers are unblocked and pointed at the right thing.

Important

Management is a distinct skill from doing the work, and being excellent at the work predicts almost nothing about being good at this.

Related terms

• Delegation — Handing over an outcome, with the authority to decide how it gets done.
• 1:1 — A recurring private conversation between a manager and a person who reports to them.
• Feedback — Telling someone specifically what you observed and what effect it had, close to when it happened.
• Setting expectations — Being explicit at the start about what success in a role looks like: the outcomes, the standard, the timeframe and how it will be judged.

Lessons that explain it

• Running 1:1s — Their meeting, not your status update. The moment it becomes a progress report it stops surfacing anything useful. (10 min)
• Giving feedback — Specific, soon, and about the effect. Vague or delayed feedback is unkind, whatever it feels like at the time. (10 min)

All 176 terms in the Founder glossary