stingerpk

I respect the intent behind the article, which as I understand is that managers should work closely with their teams and know first hand how they are adding value, instead of depending on a chart to know that.

However, there are a few problems here:

- There are more manager positions than there are qualified managers. So you will always have people who are simply bad managers. This is generally more true in larger companies where productivity of an individual team is easy to ignore.

- Even good managers are humans and are subject to emotions and biases that they don't even realise they carry around. The only things which bring objectivity is data and good processes.

- Hybrid or remote work is a larger trend that began much before covid, and while back to office mandates might make it seem that the trend is loosing steam, it is not. There will be more remote work in coming years, and that makes understanding your peers' work even more difficult.

So what is the solution? I believe that:

- You should measure events, but you should have the intent that you want to "understand" what is going on, instead of policing people. Data can reveal a lot, like conflicting work patterns, burn-out indicators, problems in communications etc. Not all metrics are bad.

- You should combine objective data with subjective feedback, as well as more context such as life events (marriage, becoming a parent etc) to understand how people work.

- Processes should enhance focus on outcomes, rather than activity. Frameworks such as OKRs are hard to implement correctly, but they do let you focus on business outcomes. The problem with knowledge work is that you cannot measure it with activities alone. Trying to bridge OKRs with activity metrics as well as subjective feedback can be helpful.

For disclosure, I am founder of a platform called Crewnetics, and we are building tools for measuring performance of knowledge workers.

We are a startup studio and we naturally wanted to build repeatable processes to jumpstart new products. We wanted to pick and choose a bunch of technologies that we good become good at and ones that could cover several use cases.

Today, we are releasing VRPA - our reference platform architecture, which is a battle hardened best practices and technology components which helps jumpstart new products very quickly.

Our existing boilerplates combined with skills that we have built over the years help us setup new platforms in a matter of days. We are now putting our platform architecture out there for everyone to see. We’d love to hear comments and suggestions.

Running corporate philanthropy campaigns isn't cheap or smooth. We created Altrunic to make it easy for businesses of all sizes run donation campaigns with top-rated charities.

Some of our core features:

- every dollar donated through Altrunic is accounted for in terms of measurable impact

- you can build a branded impact site for your charitable initiatives, and promote it with your employees and customers

- we have hand-picked charities in the platform with high transparency ratings

Since we wanted to make it easy for businesses to give back to the society, our subscription packages are going to be very reasonable. Right now we are launching the product in beta, and have major discounts available for people who are willing to join us.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and answering any questions!

Jaffar Hussain // Co-founder & CTO

I think our customers don't care what we call ourselves.

I just checked your site, indeed very similar to what I am doing. Good luck! Happy to see I'm not alone in my approach in building a next-gen startup studio.

A few things: - Only a handful of projects at one time. - Established practices and rituals. - Dedicated discovery workshop where most intricate details are figured out before we start coding anything.

Your services look pretty neat too!