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
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The Slack channel that became the wiki
Three years of decisions, debates, and dependencies — all in #eng-general. The new hire was supposed to scroll back. Nobody had ever scrolled back.
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The Friday deploy that broke Monday
Shipped at 4:47pm. Worked in staging. Discovered the edge case at 6am Monday, when ten thousand customers found it first.
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The runbook that lived in one person's head
Production went down on a Saturday. The only engineer who knew how to fix it was on a plane. Two hours of revenue burned waiting for him to land.
More on operations
- The handoff that lost the customer between two teams
- The OKR nobody could remember on Friday
- The all-hands that became a status report
- The status meeting that should have been three numbers
- Four Green Metrics, One Red Quarter
- Why Companies Pushing AI Still Punish People Who Use It
- Structuring and Running a Successful Online Sales Company
- Preparing Your Business to Scale: KPIs and Strategies for Success
- The Right Way to Delegate: Eliminate, Simplify, Automate, Delegate
- Harness the Power of Discipline to Achieve Business Goals
- AI in Marketing: Opportunities and Challenges
- Efficiency Hacks: Science-Backed Techniques and Tools for Productivity Mastery
- Efficiency Hacks: Science-Backed Techniques and Tools for
- The Art of Decision Making: Techniques for Making Better and
- The Art of Decision Making: Techniques for Making Better and Faster Decisions