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Every week, I’m sharing an essay that relates to what we are building and learning at Alan. Those essays are fed by the article I’m lucky enough to read and capitalise on.

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Balance between support, challenge, accountability & trust

As committed Alaners, we want the company to progress, we want to help, we want to push people to excellence. It is normal and it is a good thing.

A simple rule for the decision-maker is that intervention needs to prove its benefits and those benefits need to be orders of magnitude higher than the natural (that is non-interventionist) path.

Sometimes, there is a risk that we spend time asking questions and discussing topics that improve the discussion and the direction, but that are not worth the time and de-focus spent. 

Bill Gates said: “Don't remove an opportunity to learn from someone even if they didn't do it the way you wanted. Don't do things for them”. It is sometimes hard, frustrating to see people making an obvious mistake, and it is also sometimes necessary. 

As a result, we have to learn how to manage our anxiety with the unknown while keeping the highest standards. We have to ‘trust the team—give them breathing room to be creative and opportunities to shine” as Tony Fadell says.

But “you can’t let it slide into mediocrity because you’re worried about seeming overbearing.”

One of the options that has been suggested is being either very prescriptive or completely hands-off for a period (e.g., three months). I don’t like this binary choice and I don’t think it is the one that leads to the best outcome. 

In order to achieve the right balance, I have a strategy which is “no middle ground”: 

• Aligning upfront on the target vision and scope of a product (ideally over a prototype)

• Review the tiniest details of the experience to push for excellence

  • Tony Fadell also says: “Examining the product in great detail and caring deeply about the quality of what your team is producing is not micromanagement. That’s exactly what you should be doing.”

• Don’t do anything in between, let the team be creative on the solutions, or if you do provide ideas, they should be only seen as such (I know I’m not always the best at not being too pushy on ideas).

How to add value

There are several ways to keep adding value while not de-focusing the team:

• Accelerating the pace: the ambition should always be that our contributions either simplify the topic or help us get to a better conclusion or help get to it sooner

• Push for being bolder: Steve Jobs said “do whatever is necessary to get people to see things in a bigger and more profound way than they have, and to do better work than they thought they could do”, and I truly believe it is an important part of the role. 

• Connect the dots between different initiatives in the company or with the company’s strategy. In order to do it well:

  • Give more context on why you are making the comment, where you are coming from

  • Clarify the urgency/impact

• Respect as much as possible some timelines/milestones and group feedback: For example if a PSR/planning/community sync are a few weeks away and we don’t risk meanwhile to go off piste, we should try to leverage those. 

Working as a team

Of course, Senior Alaners would like not to have to step in, and if they do it is because they believe they can improve the direction.

One of the things that is really important is to see those contributions not as “challenge of who I am” or “of my work”, but as “we are trying to work as one team to get the best possible outcome”. Defensiveness and justifying positions will not help to get to a better outcome. 

Trying to digest the comment, the why the Senior Alaner is doing it, is likely the best way to improve the direction.  

For example, I had signals that the team is sometimes apprehensive about me stepping in, fearing I might veto their decisions or directions. 

On the contrary, I always just want the team to work together for the best outcome and it's not about trusting or not the team but about collaboration to have the best product possible. It is the only thing I care about. 

Steve Jobs was part of the design process at Apple, not because he didn't trust Jony Ive, but because they worked together to achieve the best result. It's normal to review and challenge each other's work, when you are working as a team. 

It is not about having a validation, or doing what the most senior Alaners think is right, it is about engaging in intense debates as one team to find the best solution. 

All the good-to-great companies have a penchant for intense dialogue. 

Trust in the team does not exclude the necessity for collaboration and mutual challenges.

Instead of being overly sensitive to feedback, let’s welcome it to have the most awesome product of all time.

Some articles I have read this week

👉 Tweet by Shreyas Doshi (X)

• Why you should set big goals: “When you set a big goal and are serious about attaining it, you end up needing to choose to do very different things, not just more of the things you would have already done i.e. it is primarily a qualitative difference, not a quantitative one.”

• The importance of creativity. 

• “This is why individuals & teams that don’t value creativity are also predictably conservative & defensive in their goal setting.”

👉 The macro in the US with bankruptcies rising 30% in the last 12 months

👉Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck (Pmarchive)

• Why it is important to get to action fast: “A certain [basic] level of action “stirs up the pot”, brings in random ideas that will collide and stick together in fresh combinations, lets chance operate.”

  • In a highly uncertain world, a bias to action is key to catalyzing success.

  • The importance of being very, very curious.

  • Link together multiple, disparate, apparently unrelated experiences on the fly.

  • “it is good to start most creative exercises with the idea that the solution may come from any of our past experiences or knowledge, as opposed to out of a textbook or the mouth of an expert.”

👉 Microsoft execs on TikTok, Nintendo, Apple, and more (Internal Tech Emails)

• Do we believe that “this big acquisition opportunities come along so rarely, that we can't afford to not pursue the idea.” is the right one? 

• I think that when we have unique opportunities we should look at them.

👉 Healthcare Weekly Press Review (Alan)

• According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the proportion of smokers among those over 15 years old exceeds a third in France, while it varies between a fifth and a quarter in neighboring countries.

  • More French people died from tobacco than from Covid-19 in 2020, and the victims were on average younger.

  • In France, about a third of high school students still smoke, and tobacco companies are exempt from any indictment.

• 80% of doctors are familiar with AI tools, with over 40% using them regularly in their professional and personal lives.

  • 45% of French people trust AI to manage their health with their doctor, and nearly half believe it's possible to be treated by their doctor using AI.

  • Almost 70% of doctors are comfortable collaborating with AI regarding patient care.

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