Building Primeloop has been a ton of fun, and not just because of the customers we help, or the product. It has also been a blast to build the kind of company I would want to work at for 10… 20… forever years. There are a lot of things we do differently here than any place I have worked before. (Remind me to dig into some of the other things later.) And, I’m not saying that no one else in the world does any of these things… I’m just saying I haven’t seen it all come together like this.
One thing I am working on this afternoon, is building a new section of our wiki (hackpad) to document our Roles and Passions. Most businesses tend to start by making a list of people (org chart) and then list all their responsibilities (job descriptions). If they even look back at these during the year, it is usually to see whether the person is doing the work. At Primeloop, we approach things a little differently. We are first making a list of Roles and letting people take ownership over these based on their Passions.
Like I pointed out before, this isn’t entirely unique. There is a methodology/product called Holacracy (used by companies like Medium, David Allen/GTD, Zappos, and quite a few other companies in Downtown Las Vegas) that uses a very similar approach. It is much more, um, involved than the process we are using. But, I could imagine evaluating it further down the road when we have a much larger team.
We also have a bit of the OKR framework baked into our process to track progress on the roles themselves and the people who are taking ownership of those roles.
It is going to be fun to see how this works. We’ve already got a few internal questions to work through.
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Speaking of questions, I’m curious to hear what kind of questions you would have if your workplace announced it is going to implement something like this?
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