Accidental Entrepreneur: Managing Using Nuances

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to my 22nd weekly article as this week is called “Managing Using Nuances.”

One of the key lessons/learnings from my startup days that I found to be very helpful was identifying and tracking the “nuances”. While the broader vision is important without accounting for the smaller details when it comes to a project, product it’ll be very difficult to succeed.

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“நுண் மாண் நுழை புலம் இல்லான் எழுல் நலம்

மண் மாண் புனை பாவை அற்று”. (407) — திருக்குறள்

“The appeal of a person who does not have the nuanced intellectual

majesty that a discerning education can give to his personality is like

the appeal of a beautified puppet made of clay”. — Thirukkural

For the success of a company or big project, it’s important to have a grand strategy and sound management processes. Since these are large in scale and visibility, everyone talks about them for the right reasons. Nearly all companies have these big items identified and people assigned to work on them. Even with the focus and resources assigned, not all projects succeed.

My observation during the journey has been, the success of these projects is not only due to the major items but also by identifying then taking care of the small items which I call focusing on nuances. Let me explain what I mean by managing nuances.

Pro/Con list: Nearly everyone who works on complex projects creates a pro/con list during the early planning and architecture phase.

Pro/Con lists consists of:

• Items such as features, requirements and advantages.
• Briefly describe the advantage of adding this feature.
• Analyze the risk of adding the feature, it could be execution, schedule or resource risk.
• Add what is known and what is unknown explicitly.
• Finally the risk of not implementing/including it in the project.

In addition to the pros and cons list for major items, people need to make many small decisions. A lot of them miss the impact as these small decisions could have implications on the larger scale or impact on another team member’s work. My approach for these small tasks was very intentional and detailed. I request the employees to put their findings and their thought process in writing which could be an email, excel spreadsheet, or presentation. I request information on the pros and cons of each approach even if it is very small. Many young and very smart engineers used to make fun of me for asking to write down nuances. It helped me build my first billion transistor design with a very small team successfully. I kept those excel spreadsheets with this information for years.

Coarse vs Fine Schedule: Managing large-scale projects to deliver on time is important. In addition to having a well-defined product and the necessary resources to execute, it is important for a manager to plan the timeline and track the progress to plan.

Coarse Planning: At the project level, upper management would focus on major milestones and deliverables. This higher level (Coarse) plan provides the management team with an analysis of the resource requirements and how to position the delivery dates and contents to customers.

Fine Planning: While that is important for measuring the progress of the overall project, if we were to wait until the milestone to evaluate the progress, a manager won’t have time to recover. This is where the understanding of “fine” details of scheduling and deliverables is important. What I mean by fine details in the schedule is that in addition to major deliverables, request everyone to break down their tasks to a granular level of work to be done over 3–5 days. This would break down a 3-week task into 4–5 intermediate tasks. In addition, list all the dependencies from others and when those items needed to be completed. As a manager, his or her responsibility is to help unblock the dependencies and allow others to execute well. Fine-scale planning is as important or more important than the coarse schedule. The reason is that fine scale would help recover early while coarse level can only help identify after the fact.

Customer Asks: Similar to product features and schedule, it is important to understand what customers want and need.

• Start with the full spectrum on requirement to cover wide enough market
• With Coarse and fine planning understand the dependencies and risk of implementing the customer request
• Initiate conversation with right people at customers to understand the “high-value” items
• Revisit the schedule and planning with customer feedback
• Present back to customer with revised schedule with highlighting their input and how you had considered in new plan

Rather than making the project more complicated, explaining this to the customer with the “nuances” has worked well for me. These kinds of discussions made customers feel part of the solution and work for the success of the project as a team.

I have given examples of nuances for product development, schedule, and customer engagements. All of these are from my experiences of building complex solutions with a small team with a fraction of the budget. Leaders and managers tend to focus on major milestones and deliverables. Just focusing on these small items, I call them “nuances”, can and will help avoid major setbacks which allow for delivering a product that a customer can use. It has been well articulated in Thirukkural, which was written 3000 years ago, that a person without nuanced understanding of a task is like a beautiful clay doll without substance inside. This is very true even now where I run into “smart” people who miss the (nuanced) point and hang up on the larger or theoretical points and fail miserably.