Zone of genius

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Your zone of genius is where the work you enjoy, the skills you’re elite at, and outsized impact all overlap. It sounds simple, but ensuring that everyone remains focused in their zone of genius is one of the more difficult challenges while scaling a startup.

Take for example, your best engineer. The one who can ship code in their sleep, solve every problem that comes their way, and reliably ships new high-impact features week after week. Assuming that they genuinely enjoy their craft, they are operating in their zone of genius.

You want to keep people in their zone of genius. But humans are human, and alternative motives and misaligned incentives will undoubtedly creep into the various stages of startup life.

To continue the example with our best engineer (we’ll call her Sarah). After a few years, the engineering team grows to a point where you’ll need to start layering in some engineering managers to keep things moving. Sarah, being the highest output engineer and one of the longest tenured, decides that she’d like to become a manager as the next step in her career.

Being a manager means she now spends most of her days occupied in meetings. The move might make her look better on LinkedIn, but she likely isn’t operating in her zone of genius anymore. Even if she enjoyed people management and was quite elite at it, it’s likely that the company benefited far more back when the highest output engineer was still shipping code.

To visualize this, here’s a team of 5 engineers, using a point scale to represent the “output” of each. Sarah was the star engineer on the left (congrats on your 100 Madden rating, queen).

But then we chose to move her into a management position. And perhaps “it works” to the extent that the output of the other engineers each increases 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 10… but I’ve never seen an engineer 2x their output because of a manager.

That’s an example of someone who was previously in their zone of genius, but moved out of it due to the scaling nature of the company (i.e. needing engineering managers).

The inverse is also really common: someone who had to operate outside of their zone of genius out of necessity, then the momentum and ego of startup life makes it difficult to later course correct.

In the early days, it’s your co-founders and a few early employees who are all wearing multiple hats and doing whatever is necessary to keep the lights on. People start leading initiatives out of necessity, not because they are the right person for the job indefinitely.

Next thing you know, your co-founder who said that they would help out on growth because no one else was doing it is suddenly running a 20-person growth team and is way over their skis.

Maybe they were the right person for the job back when you were a pre-seed company and needed someone to set up ads on Facebook, but much less so today. As far as the zone of genius goes – perhaps they love the work, but that may not be their most prominent skillset, nor is it what creates the most value for the business.

But it’s difficult to have those conversations.

My co-founder, Ben, is one of the most gifted product and design oriented engineers I’ve ever come across. No matter what he works on, he’ll come back with a final product that is 10x better than what you were anticipating was the best-case outcome.

Despite being one of the highest output engineers on the team, he expressed interest in becoming the Head of Product, which he was for about a year. He has all the intangibles to be the world’s best, but it wasn’t his zone of genius.

Turns out that he didn’t love people management or having a calendar full of meetings. Worse, the company missed out on having him contribute to what he does best.

We moved him back to exclusively working on the highest impact engineering projects at the company. He’s back in his zone of genius.

I’m not immune to any of this. In the early days, I spent all of my time talking to users, building the product roadmap, and working closely with engineers to make the platform the best it could be.

But along the way we hired lots of people, built new teams, and introduced all sorts of new responsibilities. At the end of last year I had 18 direct reports and spent meaningful time each week working on everything from ads, sales, growth, content, product, and just about everything in-between.

It’s not that I couldn’t continue doing it, it’s just that my time was better spent elsewhere.

I spent four years at Morning Brew building the infrastructure and tools to scale the company to a $75M exit. For the past four years, I’ve built beehiiv to become the de-facto platform for the world’s most popular newsletters. And in the past two years, I’ve scaled a newsletter of my own into a million dollar side project.

I feel like I know this industry better than anyone in the world.

In between Morning Brew and beehiiv, I was also a Product Lead at YouTube. I love product work and am damn good at it – it’s my zone of genius.

But I wasn’t spending the majority of my time there. So in just the past several weeks, we made a lot of changes to get everyone back into their respective zones:

First of all, that’s an absolute power squad and I can’t express how loaded we are on talent and experience right now 😮‍💨. Second, in making some of these changes I was able to shed a few direct reports and shift the majority of my time back to product.

And speaking of product, we are absolutely ripping. We are only 6 weeks into the year and we’ve already dropped quite a few goodies…

I’ve recently been able to do things I could never find the time for previously. I noticed we have had a massive influx of new users migrating over from Mailchimp, so I randomly emailed 20 of them to jump on a call.

Those calls were some of the most wildly productive meetings I’ve had in years. I took pages of notes and was able to identify why people initially chose Mailchimp, what they liked and hated about it, where they found out about beehiiv, what excited them about us, their early feedback on the platform, etc.

That led to us iterating on our onboarding, updating our lifecycle comms, squashing some bugs, improving a few features, and launching an entirely new ad campaign.

My goal is simple: make the product 1% better every single day.

I’ve honestly never been more excited about what we’re building. The next six months are the most ambitious yet, and I whole-heartedly believe that beehiiv will be in a league of its own by the time July comes around.

It’s a new day at beehiiv. We’re back in the zone.

By the way: if you’re a beehiiv user, I want to hear from you. Reply to this email with feedback on what we can do to make the platform better and put me to work.

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I’m actually in London sharing an Airbnb with Rob for the week. Our WFH setup is pretty similar to that office minus the view, floor-to-ceiling windows, furniture, plants, and presumably heat.

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