Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Case 2
Case 2
Case 2
One day, TBT CTO came to one of his team’s Engineering Manager
(EM) and said: “Hey, I think we need to develop feature A and B in
our platform”. The manager thus asked the CTO, “Why do we need
to develop this feature, boss?” The CTO told the EM that this feature
is required by our sales team to interact better with our client. It
would help them to close more deals and means it would drive the
revenue of the organization. Hearing that, the EM thus thought for
several moments and said “Okay, I’ll ask the team to develop the
feature.” The CTO said, “Okay, then, I’ll wait for the feature to be
delivered”.
If you resonate with the story above, it’s actually a typical day-to-day
scenario in your life as a middle-manager in a startup company.
Only the task might be varied, it may not be about developing
features. The tasks may be about rolling out of a certain technology
to multiple teams, migrating databases, refactoring stuff, applying
system improvement, and so on — etc. Considering multiple real
world scenarios, I can say the probability of the outcome could be
placed in the following spectrum:
Up until now, could you spot / abstract away what’s the key
difference between the various execution outcomes? Do we have a
better execution outcome more than “Good” execution outcome?
Chances are if you can resonate with the example above and be able
spot the difference, it means that you have a pretty good
understanding about execution excellence. For a final illustration, I
would like to present a last point on what I would call
an “Excellent” Execution :
Maybe some of you are wondering what’s the point of laying out the
detailed example above. The example above tries to provide
some practical guidance and examples to illustrate how
various managerial activities might manifest in a certain project /
task execution in an organization. It also can help you to
illustrate the different spectrum of manager’s capability in
carrying project execution. This spectrum of capability is the
key answer of the question of “why the heck with more people
in our organization it takes us longer and longer to get
things done?”. The hypothesis is simple, really. If you have strong
management team that can provide execution excellence, chances
are you won’t have that question. It’s every executive’s dream to
have a team of strong managers. It is also actually one of the critical
components of executive’s work, to build up a strong management
team that can execute and deliver consistently.