Fight the conformity

Life was so simple back when we first started beehiiv.

All we did was ask users what they wanted, then built it. Then we’d talk to users on other platforms, ask what they wished they had… and build that next. It was lean, agile, and fun.

I don’t think I’d use any of those words to describe my time working at Google, which is where I spent a year prior to launching beehiiv. They sit at two completely opposite ends of the spectrum.

It’s just blindly accepted that the natural trajectory of companies is to move from one end to the other. That companies just “grow up” and as they accumulate success they also begin to accumulate processes and performance reviews and everything in between.

I think that’s total bullshit.

When I think about the early success we’ve experienced at beehiiv, I believe a large part of it is due to our ability to outpace, out innovate, and out hustle relative to the competition. Waking up to a complaint from a user and shipping a solution by lunch — that’s what makes us great.

Organizations who have become bogged down with processes and layers of management cannot comprehend that last sentence.

As a founder, I get to help shape the culture we create and determine how we spend our time as a team. And quite frankly, I don’t want to spend my days in meetings or talking about processes. I genuinely don’t think anyone does, it’s just “what companies at this size do.”

But instead of conforming, I’d rather fight it.

My thesis: processes and middle management kill companies.

My solution:

I think processes exist primarily for two reasons: to prevent mistakes and because most leaders don’t actually trust their employees.

To use engineering as an example:

• A: Fuck it, ship it straight to production.

• B: Have another engineer review the code first, then test it on a staging environment.

• C: Schedule a demo with key stakeholders to discuss how each team may be impacted by the changes. Distribute materials regarding the go-to-market strategy, and have a backup plan in case there are any unintended consequences from the launch. Schedule a post-mortem after the launch to assess and extract key learnings for upcoming initiatives.

It’s not the wild west at beehiiv, we certainly have some baseline level of processes in place. But I’d argue if you hire the right people and foster the right culture, you can operate with far less friction and still yield fewer mistakes.

But mistakes are certainly part of the trade-off, and we’ve created a culture very tolerant of them (you can’t have it both ways). We even have a Slack channel #sunlighting where employees openly share their mistakes so others can learn from them.

tl;dr: rather than assuming everyone is a moron and implementing processes for the sake of preventing mistakes… empower people to take initiative and learn from previous mistakes. (See above: hire people smart enough to work with ambiguity).

I do genuinely believe that most companies operate from a place where leadership doesn’t trust their employees. When other founders learn that we’re an entirely remote company they always ask me “but how do you ensure that your employees are actually working?”

So from that lens, it makes sense that processes are just a means of quality assurance passed down from leadership.

I’d consider that “playing not to lose”. I’m playing to win:

• We hire people who prefer to work freely with autonomy and are comfortable with ambiguity. We empower them to make decisions on their own and be held accountable for them.

• I lead from a place of complete transparency. Each employee knows all of our current issues, how much revenue we’re making, how much cash we’re burning, upcoming initiatives, etc.

  • They can’t help solve issues if they don’t know what they are… and I can’t do this alone.

• Each person has meaningful equity in the business. The intention is that these shares will be life changing for everyone if this company can scale to its potential.

When you combine complete transparency with a workforce who are empowered and equally incentivized, you end up with this:

Not to be outdone by unnecessary processes, the blind acceptance that companies need middle management will also crush momentum.

Again, I’ll use engineering as an example.

Let’s say you have a 10x engineer — we’ll call her Sarah. Sarah’s output is incredible. She proactively unblocks other people on the team, takes initiative, and is voraciously pushing the roadmap forward.

Assuming you’re a tech company, the ability to swiftly push the roadmap forward is of utmost importance… so consider Sarah someone who is having an outsized impact on the success of the business.

At a certain size, you’ll feel pressured into needing some sort of management introduced into the org chart. And when that time comes, Sarah is likely the leading candidate to move into this new management role.

But taking your star engineer and making her a manager quite literally just removed her from doing what she was previously best at… to doing something entirely different.

The Boston Celtics finished the 2024 regular season with the best record in the NBA at 64-18. Now imagine if they took Jaylen Brown (their best player) and made him the coach for the playoffs. They would never consider doing that because he’s the best player on the court. Plus, there’s no guarantee he’d be even half as good a coach as he is a player.

So why do companies so frequently make the mistake of moving their top “players” into management positions?

Honestly I have no fucking idea and it doesn’t make any sense. Probably some confluence of:

• Blindly following what other companies do.

• Not offering attractive career paths to develop as an independent contributor.

• Wishful thinking that the move will “level up” everyone else on the team.

For example, here’s a team of 5 engineers. I’ll use a scale of 100 to represent their output.

Now let’s say Sarah is the star engineer on the left, and we choose to move her into a management position. And perhaps “it works” to the extent that the output of the other engineers each increase by 10!

Well now you’re still 60 points short of the output you had previously when you had your best engineer… well, engineering things. And sure, you could argue that the other members of the team could increase their output by more than the 10 value I arbitrarily chose… but I’ve seen enough shit to say I’m not buying it.

Meta and Twitter (X) laid off 24% and 80% of their workforces, respectively, over the past few years as they gutted levels of middle management. Zuckerberg even declared 2023 the “year of efficiency” … and their stock is up 194% since.

My former employer, Google, could probably learn a thing or two about handling bloat… but that’s a topic for another post.

So how do we handle management at beehiiv? Player coach.

We moved one engineer into a management position and he’s been an absolute rockstar. He unblocks the others on the team, clearly communicates objectives… and still contributes more than 60% of his time towards shipping code.

✅ Player
✅ Coach

I don’t really believe in having a pure play manager, especially as a small company. It’s 2024 — if you’re primary skillset is “communication” and “leadership” … well I’d consider that table stakes for all employees. I think the best managers are able to and enjoy to do the work themselves:

• Our CTO, despite overseeing nearly 30 employees, still contributes to the code base regularly and does some feature work.

• Our Sales lead spends the majority of his time selling and closing deals.

• Our Support lead is routinely in the queues responding to user tickets.

• Our Growth lead spends a lot of his time launching and optimizing campaigns.

Don’t over complicate it — fight the conformity.

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