

Ask HN: How much time of his time should a CEO in a 5 man team spend managing? - mingyeow

Recently, I moved from a role whereby I spent 1/3 of my time doing coding and other low level stuff, 1/3 of my time doing biz dev, 1/3 of my time planning and managing to spending 2/3 of my time planning and managing (spending no time on low level stuff)<p>I FEEL that this is making the team much better, but I am not completely sure if i am being deluded.... any feedback?
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mahmud
You code to execute vision, just as you step up a marketing campaign to
execute a vision/strategy. If you're growing so fast that the coding can't
catch up with the pace that your vision needs to be executed, give up coding
and delegate it to someone else.

You feel you're not accomplishing anything because of "muscle memory"; your
mind is used to feel accomplished when a build is complete and a test suite
passes with flying colors. Your role has changed, and now you need to get your
high from somewhere else. Feel free to go over what the team is doing a few
times a day, but ultimately you will need to give up.

If you're feeling bored you probably are not doing all you could. Business
responsibility is a hell of a burden and you should be able to visualize
months into the future while your team is still at square one. It's not the
same thing as a hack-mode, where you can shake off by scratching that itch and
writing a toy app or a library.

Look harder into your market and competition and you will find something that
you might have missed before that will keep you awake. 2/3, or 3/3 of the time
left for management will feel like peanuts :-)

~~~
mingyeow
You feel you're not accomplishing anything because of "muscle memory" - this
is a great insight - thanks a lot for that. Where did you get this phrase
from?

~~~
mahmud
It's my own observation. As a programmer, you are better equipped to arrive at
insight through reflection better than most people, using your debugging and
profiling skills ;-)

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nostrademons
"Managing" and "planning" are distinct activities, and then there are a bunch
of sub-activities that make up either.

In a 5-person startup team, you should spend virtually no time _telling people
what to do_ (i.e micromanaging). They should be able to figure that out for
themselves. If they can't, you're probably screwed.

But there's a lot of work involved in figuring out customer requirements,
breaking down those requirements into tasks that have to be done, covering
bases that would otherwise be forgotten, and generally fretting so your team
doesn't have to. If you're taking care of that so the rest of the team can
worry about the low-level details of getting stuff done, that's valuable, and
it's not unreasonable to expect that to take up 2/3 of a person in a 5-person
team.

~~~
mingyeow
"If you're taking care of that so the rest of the team can worry about the
low-level details of getting stuff done, that's valuable, and it's not
unreasonable to expect that to take up 2/3 of a person in a 5-person team."

\- THANKS a lot! that is enormously helpful and concise. Now I am kinda
feeling better. =)

