- They earn us money while we sleep. The problem is we must sleep.
- They serve customers worldwide. The problem is we inhabit meatspace.
- Their APIs are RESTful. The problem is our brains need rest.
- Their state is one of flow. We have to go with that flow.
- Their reality is that "everything fails all the time" - Vogles. And so our problem is that our customer promises are always at risk, 24x365.
- And on and on. Round the world, round the clock, everything everywhere all at once.
And if that wasn't challenging enough…
Organisations behave like "Slow A.I.s" in the Charlie Stross sense of not as quick as computers. And you will grudgingly agree that organisations also behave like "Slow A.I.s" in the sense of infuriatingly forgetful dullard.
- Limited context windows.
- Constant forgetting.
- Too much chatty back and forth.
- Frequent derailing.
- Extremely expensive rework.
… just to eke out small incremental releases to an insomniac Frankenstein's monster — no B2B SaaS is pretty — that is alive and kicking and hyper-sensitive to its changing environment.
"Ain't nothing to do with me: we're just caught in The Churn, that's all."
— Amos
But we put a bunch of A-players together!
How come they developed collective retrograde amnesia?
And so soon after being hired?
And then… How come the meme-virus infected individuals too, leaving us with an F-team of B and C players?
We already know that…
A-teams of A-players are elite communicators, above all else.
- Intelligent
- and Detail-oriented
- and Systematic
- and Spartan
So guess what we can do?
Observe, learn, copy, adapt from the best of us, to…
Cultivate a generative culture of… Writing. It. Down.
- Because we are all creatures of our environment.
- Because for A-teams to run circles around 10x-sized competition, each A-player must individually thrive.
- For A-players to thrive, workplaces must be high-trust and high-agency.
- For which, a strong writing culture is a critical success factor.
In fact, here, take all that I've pinched from the best of us…
Do you lead a "two pizza" sized SaaS product team, and…
- want to create a writing system,
- to scale the impact of your already-competent team,
- without increasing headcount, and
- without burning out anyone, including yourself?
Let's connect and talk: Email, LinkedIn.
Over the last two decades, I've chosen to work with small teams. As a high-agency person, I've thrived in tight-knit, high-functioning ones. When it works well, it's magic.
B2B SaaS happened to me in that time. I've walked the whole nine yards; coding, marketing, co-founding, selling, product managing, testing, hiring, devops-ing.
Also writing through it all. Copious notes, checklists, presentations, marketing copy, API docs, tutorials, blog posts and so forth…
So… I'd love to help!
