Pillar
Operations
Cadence, process, decisions. The systems that make a business answerable to itself.
Operations is the layer of the business that decides whether the strategy survives contact with Tuesday. Most operating problems are not strategic. They are cadence problems: the meeting that became status instead of decision, the dashboard that has been green for two years while the business deteriorated, the standing meeting that has cost forty thousand dollars and produced one decision.
The essays here cover the rhythms — weekly, monthly, quarterly — that compound into a company that is answerable to itself, and the rituals that imitate the rhythm without producing the answer. The forecast meeting. The 1:1 that became status. The Friday deploy that broke Monday. The integration nobody owned.
Operations is where the founder finds out whether the company can run without them being the answer to every open question. The essays below are what that test looks like from the inside.
Start here
Sixteen Months of Unpaid On-Call, Then Two Resignations
Three engineers carried unpaid on-call for sixteen months. Two resigned the same quarter; the third asked off. A stipend would have cost far less.
The Postmortem Nobody Read
Three action items, eleven contributors, one still open a year later. By then the same incident had recurred twice. Thorough document, zero prevention.
Year-End Operating Reviews That Aren't Reviews
3 hours, 12 leaders, 87 slides. By slide 40 the room was debating next year's plan. The year itself was never reviewed.
More on operations
- Don't Trust a Backup You Haven't Restored
- Eleven Views, Zero Decisions
- Four Reviews, Three Problems, Zero Fixed
- The Two-Page Memo
- Q2 hit plan. Three engineers paid for it.
- The Process Doc Nobody Opened
- How a System Replaces a Hero
- What Your Slack Channels Say
- Why Friday Forecasts Slip
- Inventory I Was Afraid To Cut
- The Tuesday Standup
- Two Hires That Saved $2M (and the One That Cost $4M)
- The shadow IT stack you didn't know existed
- Don't re-commit the OKR you keep missing
- Your SOC 2 Will Take Twice as Long