The Loop

Every week, close one loop.
Fix one friction. Take back a bit of time.

Most teams don't lose the thing that worked when they grow. They bury it.

Three people ran intake on instinct. One person looked at a request and knew, in about four seconds, what it was and how fast it needed to move. No form. No queue. Just someone who'd seen enough of these to know.

Then the team grew to twenty, but instinct doesn't scale on its own. So somebody wrote it down. Forty fields. Every exception from the last two years, each one captured so the new hires wouldn't miss what the original person caught by feel.

The form now takes longer to fill out than the request takes to handle.

Here's where it goes wrong. Scaling and writing everything down aren't the same move. Writing it all down tries to capture every exception a process ever hit. Scaling keeps the two or three things that actually matter and teaches people to handle the rest themselves.

Those two or three things are usually small. What is this. How fast does it move. Who's waiting on it. That's close to the whole form, and close to what the original person carried in her head.

Everything else is a style choice. How someone asks the questions. Whether they type it or say it out loud. None of that ever broke anything when one person did the job, and it doesn't break once twenty people learn to do it too.

The teams that grow clean don't write more down. They teach more people the few things that matter, and keep the form thin enough that nobody avoids using it.

Close Your Loop: Pull up whatever got “formalized” the last time your team grew. Count the fields. If there are more than five, you probably didn't scale the process. You buried it.

One ask: tell me the most bloated form your team actually uses. I read every response.

- Jonathan

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