2025-01-31 09:09:08
Fun fact - you can type your exact date of birth into YouTube search and there's tons of TV shows and commercials and content from that exact day.
2025-01-31 05:37:00
I'm seeing more companies that have weak or faltering PMF lose their minds figuring out how to make seemingly random parts of their product "agentic." Please folks – just focus on what your customers want, not on the newest solution. I promise you will make more money.
2025-01-31 02:13:25
Re Full post and subscription links here: https://staysaasy.com/management/2025/01/29/ways-youre-eroding-accountability.html
2025-01-31 02:12:58
This Is How You're Eroding Accountability
Accountability is the only way that anything gets done at scale. Businesses are complex and as any organization scales up, a larger and larger amount of work gets done out of the direct line-of-sight of senior management.
As a result, a culture of accountability is key. I’d define a strong accountability culture as one where:
- People display both agency and urgency
- People follow through on what they say they’re going to do
- The company reinforces these expectations via positive and negative reinforcement
Most management teams aren’t dumb and do their best to establish strong accountability cultures. But we wanted to share a few common ways that smart people screw up accountability on their teams, often despite the best of intentions – and what to do about them.
Not Checking That Things Get Done
What you’re thinking: “I need to hire smart people and get out of their way – that’s how we move fast.”
If you want people to follow through, you’ve got to check on how things go.
Accountability does not require perfect project check-ins, analytics, and heavyweight OKR processes (although if you can find the time, these steps will generally increase accountability on the margins). However, accountability does require some consistent checking.
You would be surprised how often managers literally don’t check that things are getting done until something breaks. At a bare minimum, you should:
Know the top 1-3 priorities of every one of your direct reports. Check on them regularly, and do not accept the same excuse twice in a row or any excuse more than 3 times in a row.
- If you’re a manager of managers, know the top 5-10 overall priorities for your management chain. Have a sense for how they are going, and require that your team keep you up to date on them if they’re off track.
- If something is off track, follow up fast and get a full understanding of what’s going on.
- Understand what your top 1-3 priorities are, and if your manager isn’t checking on you regularly (perhaps they didn’t read this post), provide proactive updates.
Many leaders get busy as their teams scale, and don’t have the time to check on key projects under their control. But instead of rearranging their work cadence to check on how things are going, they blindly trust local leaders to enforce accountability. This is the easy way out both logistically and emotionally, but it’s essential to make time to check in because ultimately accountability rolls up to you. Anything else doesn’t work.
Strategic Whiplash
What you’re thinking: “We’re a versatile team – we adapt our strategy as new data comes in. We aren’t like those big companies that operate like cruise ships, we’re a small nimble speedboat.”
Everyone knows what strategic whiplash looks like. Your plans change every 4 weeks; you’re always adding new projects, and worse, the newest project automatically becomes the company’s top priority. As a result, new initiatives are added and subsequently cancelled like a revolving door.
Let’s say that your top priority as of January 1st is to launch a new product line that will help to expand market share. But then your cash forecast comes in, and making sure that we hit profitability becomes an all-hands-on-deck emergency for February. And at the end of March, a competitor launches a new AI feature that we need to respond to. By April, people are barely thinking about whether the new January product line stands and accountability for it evaporates. If you can’t trust that plans will remain the same, you don’t have any incentive to follow through – urgency goes out the window, timelines slip, and the trickiest 10% of every project remains perpetually undone.
Changing course on priorities should be possible, but not easy – it should require real thought and a conscious decision.
Luckily, strategic whiplash is pretty obvious. Anyone can enter your business and immediately see that you’re constantly changing course. Unfortunately, this isn’t true of other problems that crush accountability…
Incorrect Incentives
What you’re thinking: “I need to tie teams to metrics to make sure they’re getting things done.”
On balance it’s better to goal teams based upon clear metrics. But incorrect incentives can destroy accountability when they attempt to hold people to poor or impossible to achieve KPIs.
There are two main ways that incorrect incentives break accountability:
- Narrow Goals: Teams set goals that are too narrow, and focus on them entirely to exclusion of other things that matter. The classic case of this is a sales team that does anything to close the next deal, even if it means overpromising or undercharging the customer.
- Overly Broad Goals: Teams set goals that are too broad. Teams end up “owning” metrics that they obviously don’t completely control, and their managers (somewhat reasonably) don’t hold them accountable when those metrics go sideways. For example – maybe you make your Product team solely responsible for Net Dollar Retention (NDR). What happens if your support team underperforms, your engineering team introduces a bevy of bugs, or your sales team closes a slew of bad-fit customers? If you hold the Product team to an NDR outcome regardless, you’re an unfair tyrant; but if you don’t hold them to it, you’ve just degraded accountability.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer here, but incorrect incentives are such a common cause of broken accountability that it’s always worth considering in any situation where accountability is eroding. Some heuristics to look for when setting goals:
- Objective Goals: Goals need to be objective – it’s normal to have debates about whether a goal is reasonable, but there should never be debates about what the number actually was.
- Clear Evaluation: When goals are evaluated, it should be clear whether a team actually hit the goal, and also whether that goal was hittable in the first place.
- Reasonable Practices: Managers must evaluate whether teams used common sense and didn’t sacrifice some other area of the business to hit their targets; the expectation should be set upfront that compromising other business areas isn’t okay.
In general, my recommendation is to set simple goals and explicitly set a broad expectation that people will be reasonable in hitting them. For example, “Your goal is to generate pipeline. But my expectation is that you do not meaningfully harm other key metrics or reasonable practices to get there, and I’ll look at those other factors when we determine whether your pipeline goals were actually hit.”
Broken Org Charts
Broken org charts are bad in general, but in the worst case they destroy accountability by diffusing responsibility across multiple people. This is the worst way to destroy accountability, because it can remain hidden until someone does forensics.
There are two main ways that org charts get broken, and both have to do with overlapping accountability:
Overlapping Roles
What you’re thinking: “This is really important, so we need to make sure that more than one person is accountable.”
It’s very hard to establish accountability when more than one person is responsible for some important goal or metric. There are people who can work together to be jointly accountable, but this creates compounding risk – if even one person isn’t highly responsible, the whole system fails. A classic example would be that both sales and customer success are responsible for customer renewals, but as a result neither ends up fully owning the outcome.
This is conventional wisdom nowadays, but worth reinforcing: If more than one person is accountable for an outcome, then no one is accountable. The best litmus tests for this:
- If a project fails or a target is missed, do you know who gets fired?
- If a project wildly succeeds, do you know who will be rewarded and praised?
- Do you use any version of the phrase “dotted line reporting?”
Org Charts That Are Too Deep
What you’re thinking: “We need more management coverage so that we can scale up our team – let’s hire another layer of managers so everyone gets individualized attention.” Or worse – “if I don’t make this person a manager, they’re going to quit.”
A different, equally dangerous accountability risk comes from org charts that are too deep. For example, let’s imagine a situation with:
- A VP
- Who manages 3 Senior Directors
- Who each manage 2-4 Directors
- Who each manage 3-7 Managers or Senior Managers
- Who each manage 5-8 Individual Contributor (IC) direct reports
If there is a very serious issue in the zone of control for IC #55 (let’s call him Bob), who gets woken up at 4am to help fix it? Is it their manager? They’re too junior to know anyone in the executive team. Is it the Senior Director or VP? They probably barely know Bob’s name. Even worse, everyone is able to look a level or two up or down the org chart and think “someone else has got it.”
The net result wrecks accountability. Problems get relayed up the chain of command slowly, because nobody likes escalating to their manager. Because everyone else is assuming that someone else is accountable, many otherwise solvable issues seem to just… disappear. Except they don’t actually go away – they just disappear from the radar, and only materialize when they’ve become so significant and problematic that they’re impossible to ignore.
Then, when it’s time to actually debug the problem, you’ll find that accountability is nowhere to be found. Managers subtly blame their reports. Direct reports subtly blame their managers. The standard response is that some ICs get scapegoated for the first few incidents, some managers get blamed when the pattern continues, and eventually the leader of the department gets axed when someone realizes how broken their organization has become. This process can take years to unfold, with worse and worse outcomes occurring the whole time.
The faster solution is to structure your org chart correctly, and not end up in this situation at all. It’s essential that you fix this as a leader – unlike many other cases of eroding accountability, broken org charts are relatively easy to identify and fix proactively, but you have to actually check them because there often aren’t explicit external symptoms that they’re broken.
Takeaways and Quick Solutions
Happily, if you have a smart team, all of the issues above can be combated in simple ways:
- Set up regular check-ins for all of your department’s most important projects. Keep a running, written list of how they’re going.
- Avoid strategic whiplash. Plans shouldn’t get cancelled without a discussion or written doc, and when you’re at capacity new projects shouldn’t get added unless prior projects are explicitly cancelled or deprioritized.
- When you see accountability eroding, check on team incentives to see if they’re a cause.
- Check for broken org charts – every 6-12 months, do a cursory check for overlapping roles or org charts with too much “depth.”
And finally, reinforce accountability via your company’s reward system. It’s critical that people who consistently don’t perform are managed out, and people who consistently perform well are rewarded. This sets the foundation for all other elements of accountability and gives the system teeth.
2025-01-30 09:31:49
It's completely not their fault, but I've unfortunately never seen a product marketer that was better at pitching their product than the founders. Product marketing that isn't founder-driven always feels like hiring someone on Craigslist to officiate your wedding.
2025-01-30 06:43:00
This is a great post but imo the point on quality is even worse than @edsuh stated. When a company smears AI lipstick on their pig of a SaaS product (why is my expense software now an AI play?!!), they're confirming that they have no idea how to innovate or please customers
