How a startup loses its spark
&gt; <i>Is this preventable? I think not.  If you look closely, all these problems fundamentally come from…</i><p>It is preventable.<p>I built an ISP in mid-90s, a digital agency in late 90s, another digital agency and a streaming CDN (world&#x27;s first VDN) in 00s, as well as worked as chief architect for cloud at world&#x27;s largest hedge fund and CTO of world&#x27;s second largest bank.  I&#x27;m currently an entrepreneur again, co-founding and building a hedge fund from scratch.<p>My experiences across these, particularly at the digital agencies (where I got to help hundreds of clients go through growth) and the mega bank (where I got to see how things working when small can also work somewhere global), tell me all the goodness from the initial list can be built into the operating model, with a couple caveats.<p>These are hard[^1]:<p>1. No domain versus technology divide.  If you hear &quot;The business wants...&quot; or &quot;I need I.T. to...&quot; it&#x27;s not going to work.  At a fintech, for instance, all teams should have both fin and tech on the team, owning their outcomes.<p>2. No command and control managerialism better suited for piecework than building.  No project managers.  No scrum-masters.  Importantly, and apparently pure heresy:  <i>no projects</i>.[^2]<p>Instead of projects, think, what should we do better?<p>Instead of controlling for budgets and delivery dates, control for focus (like priorities but mostly about saying &quot;no&quot; to things instead of &quot;yes&quot; to everything with stack ranking) and outcome value (e.g. RoI or RoE instead of hitting dates).  Then you can manage the money as investments in teams delivering outcomes, instead of budgets for projects.<p>Hitting dates well becomes easy <i>and fun&#x2F;rewarding</i> when you scope using focus instead of pre-defining all (probably imperfect) requirements and you ensure teams are equipped with people (will, skill), and resources (tools, space) to own outcomes.  (If people are called resources, run away.)<p>It is preventable, and I&#x27;m happy to talk live with anyone building a work management tool that is interested in our approach.<p>---<p>[^1]: see wicked problems: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wicked_problem" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wicked_problem</a><p>[^2]: You can do time-boxed work with an outcome.  That could look a lot like a project.  But the word “project” tends to bring with it a pile of practices that all kill the intrinsic motivation for building things you&#x27;re proud of.<p>It&#x27;s interesting even companies as smart as Linear (the Jira alternative, check out their Linear method pages for a lot of better than usual thinking) <i>don&#x27;t want to even listen</i> why they should (and could just by allowing renaming a few terms in their tool) support a non-project-centric view of building your company and enjoying doing it.