I'm not sure whether it's necessarily harder than an in-person team, but it's hard in different ways. Since we're all pretty new to this, that difficulty can take its toll. That leads to trouble: lack of productivity, disconnection, or just a serious drop in morale.

What's the deal? What makes remote work so much tougher on teams?

We don't have all the answers, but we have a humble thesis: it's because of the sudden & total reliance on written communication.

The rules of remote communication

Most of us office-workers are pretty good at verbal communication. We know how to bond with our coworkers, and how to conduct ourselves in a meeting. If we're a manager, we know how to lead those meetings in a way that gets everyone to nod their heads in understanding (or at least, pretend to).

Replacing all those meetings and off-the-cuff conversations with Slack messages and emails makes things harder. How do we ensure everyone has read and understood what we're saying? How do we brainstorm and collaborate?

Zoom meetings can help, sure. But after a four-hour Zoomfest, everyone has to admit it's not the same.

For a remote team, written communication is king. But your colleague who can lead an engaging meeting can't necessarily craft an engaging email, or carry a Slack conversation to save his life.

Here at Laskie, we've all been working remote for years. Here's what we learned about communicating well in a long-distance world: our five rules for remote communication, if you will.

Rule #1: Overcommunicate

If you post an important update in your team's group chat, you don't know if everyone's read it. You don't know if everyone understood the consequences. You don't know if they just skimmed it while playing with their dog in the backyard.

You can't communicate something once and expect the team to "get it." Overcommunication means taking those extra steps to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Communicate all important information at least three times. That might mean a public Slack post, an email, and a private Slack conversation with each key stakeholder. Make sure you get actual feedback that people know what you need them to know.

Rule #2: Be concise.

Reading lots of text sucks. On the internet, we've been trained to skim. When people skim, they miss things.

So keep it short. Cut your writing down to just the essential info.

Short, punchy, with high density of information. Not dense like a physics textbook, but dense like your grandma's recipes.

Rule #3: Use the right channel

This rule is also known as "bring back email, but do it right."

For years, chat companies have been trying to convince us email is dead. That's why our spouses and roommates have to suffer through the Slack notification sound every five minutes, right?

Well, email has its place. It's the best way to share information when no discussion is needed. It's easy to search and manage.

But (and this is key) don't forget rule #2. No long emails. Each one should be short, with a clear purpose, and clear next steps.

Some things require a Zoom conversation. Some can be a quick chat message. Others require an email. Pick the right channel for your purpose.

Rule #4: Construct your knowledge base

The fewer conversations someone needs to have to find out what they need to know, the better.

Your team should take what's in their heads and put it in a central location: Google Drive, or Notion, or Confluence, or anything. Build a knowledge base with everyone's combined wisdom.

But there's an art to this. Your employees need to get good at writing and maintaining useful pages. Which leads us to the final, more important rule...

Rule #5: Treat written communication as a skill

Written communication is HARD. It's a whole 'nother ball game, as they say. And it's very, very important, since your team can't do anything if they can't communicate. So invest time in training your team to do it right.

Which leads us to... the sales pitch. Actually, it's not a sales pitch, because we just want to give you something for free.

The take-your-team-to-the-next-level writing guide

We've written a guide on great writing that's perfect for your team.

It's structured as a way for them to become trusted authorities in their company and industry. It's a guide on writing everything, including: essays, emails, Notion pages, and emoji-filled Slack messages.

To get the guide, reply to this email with I WANT MY TEAM TO WRITE BETTER. Or send the same message to hello@laskie.co.

If you know anyone else who might benefit from this guide, forward this email to them. Maybe put something nice at the start, like "I know YOU don't need this, since you're a stellar writer, but perhaps your coworkers do..." They'll like that.

Thanks for reading, and happy writing.

In 2019, the cost of poorly organized and run meetings was estimated at $399 billion in the United States. Meetings waste more time than any other business activity. Time that could be used creating value and achieving your company's mission.

It's a problem that needs more attention than it gets.

We are researching meeting waste and how to fix it for an upcoming playbook. We compiled notes from over 50 books, essays, stories, and research papers. Here is a summary of the common root causes we've found so far:

Scheduling a meeting is the path of least resistance. There is very little friction when scheduling a meeting at most companies. There is no feedback about the quality of the meetings you organize.

A meeting can feel like the easiest next step in the moment, but it's probably not the most efficient.

Being busy feels productive. Without a strong feedback loop about how valuable and productive your work is, people will do things that are visible. Meetings feel and look like productivity even when they don't move you closer to your goals.

Accepting an invite is the default behavior. The cultural norm is usually to accept a meeting invite. Attendees should think more deeply about the goal of a meeting and if they are really needed to achieve the outcome. It should be a cultural norm to RSVP 'No' if you shouldn't be there and 'Maybe' if you need more information to decide.

Meetings have ripple effects. Meetings usually need pre-work and follow up work. They often create more meetings because it's an easy next step. The 2nd and 3rd effects of a meeting should be considered when doing an ROI calculation. This is often tough to do.

Managers overuse meetings. Managers are incentivized to be visible and hands-on. They also need to build rapport and trust with the people they work with.

When you are not producing other measurable work, communication is often your output. Meetings are the path of least resistance to facilitate communication.

I can't count the number of times I've been guilty of this.

It takes discipline to deeply consider the ROI of a meeting before you have it.

Writing is an underdeveloped skill. Most people have an easier time communicating through speaking than other mediums. Writing your thoughts down is not only a good way to avoid meetings, it's also a great way to think more clearly. It's a skill that needs to be developed more deliberately at organizations.

Meetings are too big. The bigger a meeting gets the less effective it becomes. We often invite people to meetings because we want them to feel included. Rarely do we limit meetings to the smallest group of people that can accomplish the goal.

Meetings are too long. Parkinson's Law says that work expands to the time allotted to it. 30 and 60-minute meetings are scheduled because that's the norm. We rarely need all that time to accomplish the actual goal. 5, 10, or 15 minutes should be used far more often.

It's hard to run an efficient meeting. They go off on tangents, drag on, and don't stay focused on the objective. The follow-up is poor because next steps and decisions aren't properly recorded and communicated to the right people. Good facilitators keep a laser focus, bring people back to the goal and always try to end early.

No accountability for poorly run meetings. There is little incentive for employees to improve the quantity and quality of their meetings. Most organizations are not providing the feedback and guidance needed.

Managers schedule for their own calendar. When someone with a busy schedule sets up a meeting, they are likely going to pick a time that makes the most sense for them.

If your attendees rely on deep work to be productive, this can cause non-obvious damage. Breaking up a 2 or 3-hour block of focused time kills productivity. Managers should be thinking about crafting the most productive schedule for everyone on the team.

Paul Graham talks more about this in his essay Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule.

Leadership is not setting a good example. Leaders are in a lot of meetings. Every meeting is an opportunity to show how to properly approach them. A leader's actions signal to the rest of the team how they should act. Almost every leader could afford to be more deliberate about the example they set.

Every company will need a different mix of tactics and tools to address their meeting waste. We are working on a meeting playbook to compile and summarize every option worth considering. Sign-up for early access.

This post was written by Daniel O'Shea, co-founder of Laskie. Email daniel@laskie.co with feedback or questions.

Laskie builds playbooks for common business challenges. We help leaders select the right mix of tactics, experts, and tools to address their biggest problems.

This is, after all, the company that Y Combinator founder Paul Graham just called "the next Google." This is the company that has experienced what McKenzie calls "hypergrowth" over the past few years. Last September, it was valued at $35 billion.

The secret to Stripe’s success, in McKenzie's view, owes to one simple decision. One simple choice, that is embedded into the culture.

As he puts it, Stripe "set its operating cadence to 'run'".

"Could that be done faster?"

"I don’t think Stripe is uniformly fast. I think teams at Stripe are just faster than most companies, blocked a bit less by peer teams, constrained a tiny bit less by internal tools, etc etc. There are particular projects which have been agonizingly long to ship; literally years after I would have hoped them done. But across the portfolio, with now hundreds of teams working, we just get more done than we “should” be able to."

The culture of speed at Stripe manifests itself in a few ways. Here's a sampling from McKenzie:

• moving forward with projects without waiting to hire the right people (and thus waste months)

• doing worthy work now, instead of waiting to incorporate it in quarterly planning

• consistently asking in meetings “Could we do that faster? What is the minimum increment required to ship? Could that be done faster?”

All of these choices require a certain tolerance for risk and failure. But the potential upside is incredibly high, if your teams consistently choose the fast approach.

Stripe's focus on pace comes from the top-down. CEO Patrick Collison keeps a list of "fast" projects on his website.

Amp it up

Frank Slootman is the CEO of Snowflake, which recently made history with the largest IPO of all time. In a blog post from 2018, he expresses a similar love of speed:

"It is breathtaking how slow, substandard and unfocused many companies out there get through the day. And think nothing of it. The lack of energy is palatable. There is performance upside everywhere. As a leader, your opportunity is to reset in each of these dimensions. You do it in every single conversation, meeting, and encounter. You look for and exploit every single opportunity to step up the pace, expect a higher quality outcome, and narrow the plane of attack."

He champions what he calls "performance-centric thinking." As with Stripe, this isn't a step-by-step strategy or a set of tactics. Instead, it's a series of decisions made at every level of the company.

It means asking that crucial question: "Could that be done faster?"

And if the answer is yes, it means following through. Again, and again, and again.

Want help increasing your team's pace? Reach out to hello@laskie.co and let's see how we can help.

But the long-term survival rates of startups is pretty low, and if you look at more informal side-hustles and part-time projects, I imagine it’s even lower.

Looking for opportunities

There are tremendous opportunities to be found by sorting through dead, expired, or abandoned projects.

Maybe the creator got bored? Maybe they moved onto bigger and better things? Perhaps they were great at building and bad at selling?

This week I went through 200+ projects that had wildly successful initial launches on Hacker News and Product Hunt within the last few years. We’re talking about thousands of upvotes in most cases - putting all of these projects in the top 0.1% of launches on these sites.

I’m not sure of the exact 1-year, 3-year, 5-year survival rates (if you have too much time on your hands and want to help us figure that out, email me), but anecdotally, a large percentage of these once-red-hot projects are redirected to expired domains just a couple years later.

Some of my favorite dead projects

DemandRush

Launched on Hacker News in 2017 with a whopping 1,100 upvotes and 451 comments (putting it at #16 in the top Show HN posts of all time), and seemed to go dark about a year ago.

Great concept. Get people to raise their hand for unsolved problems they’re facing, and put a price tag on what they’d pay to make the problem go away:

OneView Calendar

Launched a few years ago with 825 upvotes and almost 200 comments, making it the 40th most popular Show HN of all time.

The site has shut down, but you can still go back through their original demo. There still feels like a big opportunity to make good-looking and more intuitive calendar apps in 2020.

Maitre Viral Referral Waiting List

Was one of the top products of the month on Product Hunt when it launched, and generated 2,289 upvotes.

An insane name for a product that did exactly what it sounded like: help brands create referral-based waiting lists in seconds. There are sites today that do this, but given the resurgence of waiting lists for communities and apps, there is probably a fresh approach waiting to be built.

Conclusion

Great ideas are everywhere. You don’t always need to re-invent the wheel.

Sometimes looking through Top Hacker News Launches or Most Upvoted Product Hunts can be a good source of inspiration.

PS: some very-much-alive products I found along the way and like

• Oppreist: Standing desks made of cardboard. No, you’re not drunk - the site is in Norwegian. Great idea with everyone working from home and making makeshift desks out of stacks of books.

• Snaptrude: a slick app to transform rough sketches into realistic architectural models.

• UHMMM: if you do a lot of Zoom calls, this is hilarious. Best demo I’ve seen in a while.

• Scan Your PDF: push back on bureaucracy by uploading your PDF and making it look as though it was scanned.

—

This post was written by Chris Bakke, co-founder of Laskie.

Laskie helps companies solve their most impactful problems.

If you have a sales, data science, engineering, operational, or hiring question, email chris@laskie.co

Onboarding was something I didn't take seriously in my early days as a founder and manager. I figured I could do the basic setup work, answer any big questions, and throw people into the fire. They'd figure it out. I couldn't justify investing in something more time-consuming.

As I spent time reflecting and learning about how to build a strong culture, my opinion changed dramatically.

A good onboarding process makes a good first impression. It sets an example for how you want your new team member to act as part of the team.

If being rigorous and organized is important to you, then your onboarding process better reflect that. If you want your team to be passionate and friendly, that better come across loud and clear in the first several weeks of interactions. The process should be crafted around the values that matter most to your team.

Good onboarding sets expectations. Expectation setting can have a huge impact on how people perform. It also influences how they feel about themselves and their team over time.

And to be clear, onboarding extends well past the first week. It lasts as long as a new hire is learning how to work within the team. It's at least a 30-day process. Probably more like 90 days.

Since it's so important, you should always be thinking about what you can do to improve. Not every tactic works for every team and set of values, so you should experiment with what feels right.

Here are some things I'd recommend trying first:

Have a senior leader share the mission and values

Schedule an hour-long 1:1 with at least one founder or senior leader. This interactive discussion should be all about culture, mission, and values. It's helpful to tell the story with a deck but you should encourage lots of questions.

The new hire should leave this meeting with a clear idea of what it looks like to align with the values and culture.

I usually spend a lot of time talking about 80/20 thinking with specific examples of how we applied it in the past. Other things I cover include psychological safety, not-invented-here syndrome, ownership, and customer empathy. All things that have a big impact on how people operate day-to-day.

Give a history lesson in decision making

Share historical artifacts that will help the new hire understand how the team thinks and works. They provide rich context about the current state of the company. They provide important examples to the new about how to evaluate options when they are making a decision.

Documents on important decisions are the most useful asset to share. They should capture the thought process behind the decisions.

Documents with important insight about your customer, product, or market are very useful. Big experiments that were run and a summary of the results also provide good context.

For engineers: notable postmortems, design docs, and pull requests are very helpful. The more discussion the better.

Onboarding success should have a clear owner

Assign an onboarding buddy. This person should be directly responsible for making sure the new hire has a good experience. The buddy should work closely with them for 30-90 days.

Make it clear to the buddy that this is a top priority. Onboarding success should be evaluated as part of performance reviews if you do them.

Choose a buddy that is senior and buys into the company culture.

Have the mission-to-metrics talk

Explain the company mission, how that mission is measured, and how the new hire is advancing that mission. They should also know what metrics are being used to track their impact on the mission.

They should walk out with a complete mission-to-metrics story they can recite on-demand.

Learn more about how to use mission-to-metrics to get alignment.

Interested in getting a full onboarding playbook?

At Laskie we build playbooks for common operational challenges like onboarding.

We are building out a full playbook with dozens of tactics, tools, and stories for successfully growing your team and culture.

If you are interested or have feedback hit me up: daniel@laskie.co

One of the best tactics for getting alignment comes from SpaceX, a tool called mission-to-metrics.

What is mission-to-metrics?

Here's a succinct explanation from Ali Rowghani:

"One of the best examples of “Mission-to-Metrics” alignment comes from a friend who visited the manufacturing floor at SpaceX. Seeing a SpaceX employee assembling a large part, he stopped to ask him, “What is your job at SpaceX?”

He answered, “The mission of SpaceX is to colonize Mars. In order to colonize Mars, we need to build reusable rockets because it will otherwise be unaffordable for humans to travel to Mars and back. My job is to help design the steering system that enables our rockets to land back on earth. You’ll know if I’ve succeeded if our rockets land on our platform in the Atlantic after launch.”

The employee could have simply said he was building a steering system for landing rockets. Instead, he recited the company’s entire “Mission-to-Metrics” framework. That is alignment."

Mission-to-metrics (M2M) means every person in your company understands what they're doing, and why it's important for the company's mission. There's no better definition of alignment.

How to implement mission-to-metrics

M2M needs to be implemented as both a top-down AND a bottoms-up approach.

Your company's mission should already be defined. If not, start there. It should be simple, clear, and tangible, exactly like "colonize Mars." Elon Musk is great at this; see Tesla ("accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy") and the Boring company ("reduce traffic in metropolitan areas").

From there, we go top-down. Each sub-organization in your company should define its own mission that fits into the broader goal ("we build the rockets that will help us colonize Mars"). Each team within those organizations should do the same.

Individuals should come up with their M2M statement, with help from their managers. This is a good opportunity to make sure people are doing work they care about; if it's hard to come up with an M2M statement, perhaps they are in the wrong area of the organization.

Using mission-to-metrics to help collaboration

When every individual has a personal M2M statement, like that fellow at SpaceX, it's easy to come together to collaborate across teams.

Requests for collaboration should be framed within this concept. Encourage employees to make requests in this format: "Hey, I'm Rebecca, I design the steering system that enables our rockets to land back on earth when returning from Mars. Can your team help us with this particular task?"

M2M makes it easy to understand how another team's project relates to your own team's goals. It makes it easy to turn down irrelevant requests, or point them to the right people.

Encourage your managers to constantly update an individual's M2M, and encourage individuals to use M2M to frame their collaboration requests.

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