‘COO' - Fancy Title for 'Indigestion Doctor’
More startups die from indigestion than starvation. It’s a self-inflicted disease of More. More products, more ideas, more options. The COO needs to be the prescription for this indigestion by protecting the organization and CEO from this damage.
You’ll see thousands of small issues and new ideas every week. Even if you wanted to, waking hours will dictate that you simply wouldn’t be able to solve them all. But, for each issue that comes to you, it’s likely an uber-important issue for that stakeholder -- otherwise they wouldn’t bring it to you. As COO you must enable people to solve their own problems, shut down distractions, and help bring force and focus to your most important strategic imperatives.
I’ve seen startup indigestion first hand.
We had a business development exec that was an “ideas person.” Every conversation, every article, and every interaction sparked a new direction or new need for our product. Each idea had merit, but for every new idea, our product and engineer leaders would find themselves trapped in conversation debating the merit of this new idea against our current priorities. If not careful the CEO would find themselves in the same trap. While exciting and interesting, we still needed to put 99% of our effort against our core product. Unrelated meetings would get hijacked by “what if we…” or “we should…” or “we could…” all valid ideas but all things that were causing indigestion and lack of focus. We needed to protect ourselves from distraction while giving the business development exec a mechanism for exploring their ideas. Enter the roadmap review.
We created a transparent and accessible product roadmap review process. Anyone in the company could submit ideas as long as they were sufficiently spec’d out. Most important, we dictated that this meeting would be used to set the course of the product.
Those engineers and product people that were previously overwhelmed by theoretical ideas could now point to the process and channel our business development person’s energy towards this process and the business development exec could have his ideas captured and respectfully heard.
As COO your job is to leverage the company against a set of focused strategic initiatives. At the same time, you need to protect the company and CEO from potential indigestions by lightweight systems and processes for mitigation of distractions.
Here’s the model I’ve used to do this:
Stop production for critical issues - Critical issues, game-changing news, updated regulations, and the like that have the impact to dramatically alter your business need to be addressed with haste. You should be willing to quickly re-prioritize and gather your team to solve them.
Process new ideas - New ideas are full of potential. It could be amazing! It could be transformational! The problem with new ideas is that they almost all fall into the theoretical could or should camp -- they are neither proven nor are they promised. To be clear, I’m talking about big new ideas here along the lines of major new features or initiatives. In order to protect the organization, it is essential that you have a transparent and easy process for evaluating new ideas. I suggest implementing a backlog list and a regular meeting to assess if new backlog items have more potential than the best thing on the current “not doing” list. It’s important for efficiency's sake to require that ideas be fleshed out -- it’s not a brainstorming list, it needs to be tangible and the person proposing the idea should have fleshed out the framework, some of the work required and the opportunity.
Put the big fires out - I like to assign dyads and triads for putting big fires out, with one clear directly responsible individual (DRI) assigned for accountability. Assigning a smaller group of those leaders most impacted by the problem ensures that the right subject matter experts are involved and those with the most at stake in terms of outcomes are focused on the solution. It also insulates the rest of the team from the nitty-gritty of the issue.
Let small fires burn - As a leader, you need to enable the area owner to solve this type of problem. The enablement happens by recognizing the issue, reframing it to them in terms of a problem statement (“what should we do here?”), and empowerment to solve the issue once the solution hypothesis is decent enough. If necessary give them the right top cover in the organization to get it solved. Of course, the above is predicated in the person being the “right” person to solve the small fire. If they’re not the right person, you’ll need to re-route the problem and hypothesis to the right owner to ensure great results.
When the above is applied well it means that your executive team can focus on only the most important strategic issues and cross-team collaboration, in other words, the reason why you hired them.