brennanm

It's not a good time for tech: - 3rd largest NASDAQ downturn in 20yrs - Growing companies down 75% in 6mo

And now… 30k people laid off since March.

Including from companies like Tesla, Superhuman, Loom, Bolt, Clickup, Netflix, and Canva.

There's a lot of stuff written on what founders/execs should do.

But nothing for the manager caught in the middle.

I thought I'd write a quick take for us to discuss

---

First... the doom and gloom your reading is probably true.

Your company isn't immune from this -- and it certainly can't survive without your help.

So Tech Managers here's 3 things you need to do:

---

1. What to do today: Change your mindset

- You’re not a bottle floating in an ocean at the whim of the wind. Be a buoy - It's extra important to be a diligent leader today. - Don't create fear or spread rumors. But do due-diligence on your function to get ahead of things.

---

2. What to do this week: Do an audit A) Goals: How are you tracking? What's best case, most likely, and worst case? Whatever it is, build a plan to get back on track starting now. B) Team: It might be time to kick some of the nice-to-have projects down the road 6 months so you can stay hyper-focused on your goals. Make sure your team knows why they’re essential to the operations of the business - it will help focus. C) Expenses: Cut what you don’t need. In reality, you should consistently be doing anyway. But take this time to re-set.

And tally the total… you’ll need it later.

---

3. What to do this quarter: Take action

Don’t get paralyzed by analysis.

A small action now is just as meaningful as a large action much later.

---

There's so much more that you could/should be doing including... Discussions to have with your team Get serious about managing up Use your network for any hires Questions to ask your boss Make diamonds

There's actually so much of this other stuff I wrote an article to cover it (https://hypercontext.com/blog/modern-manager-community/how-managers-should-prepare-for-layoffs)

---

What'd we miss?

Hey HN,

At Hypercontext (S21 / https://hypercontext.com) we build an app that helps managers run better meetings by making sure those meetings have an agenda, notes, and goals that tie back to their OKRs.

But really we want to help managers become great. So we asked over 500 people exclusively working within tech everything we could to see what we could find.

--

Here's what we found:

1. Unproductive employees are 2.8X more likely to not know their goals.

2. People who know their goals are over 3X more likely to work at a company that’s in hyper-growth.

3. Discussing your goals weekly increases confidence in hitting them by 2.7x.

4. The 1:1 is the most valuable meeting type (doesn't matter if eng, sales, cs, or exec)

5. Managers who run 1:1s have 1.5x better retention on their team.

6. Paying below market increases turnover by 1.3x. Paying above didn't seem to decrease turnover.

7. According to their team, the #1 improvement needed for their manager is in a clear vision/strategy

8. Meanwhile, managers self-report their largest challenge is "not micromanaging"

9. Gen Z and and Women of color are least comfortable speaking in meetings

10. People who are not comfortable in meetings are 3x more likely to have applied for another job in the past 6m

--

Full report here, ungated: https://hypercontext.com/state-of-high-performing-teams-in-tech

Hi HN, we’re Brennan and Graham, founders of Hypercontext (https://hypercontext.com). We make an app that helps managers run their 1:1 and team meetings with action items, feedback, and OKRs (goals) in one workflow.

Most managers get promoted into their role with no training. “Oh you’re a good engineer? Great! Now manage a team of engineers and stop coding”. They’re largely leading with trial-and-error tactics. The good ones are reflective and learn, and many eventually read books on best practices and frameworks that can help them. Our insight is that it’s possible to build some of these good frameworks into a workflow so every manager can get them by default, similarly to how a good software framework lets you not have to hand-roll all the boilerplate code, so you can focus on the business logic. We think it’s time managers stop winging it (worst case) or hand rolling their management frameworks (best case) in Google Docs and Moleskin notebooks and start importing frameworks that solve the basics for them.

Previously, Graham and I have been co-founders for 10 years together. Our last startup grew to ~40 employees. When we became full-time managers we were shocked at the lack of tooling that existed for general management work. This was where the idea for Hypercontext came from. We started building tools and systems to help us fill the gaps (mainly in Google Sheets/Docs/Forms). We shared them with friends and they were loved.

Personally, I stumbled through management in my first startup. I didn’t talk about goals. I didn’t share candid feedback. I wasn’t clear or consistent. I thought I knew how to do other people’s jobs. I learned the hard way every single time. And so did all of my peers. The only way to save a fellow manager from that pain was by sharing personal tips or recommending books. We thought there must be a better way.

Hypercontext starts before the meeting: connecting to your existing meetings and helping you and your team build a collaborative agenda and show up prepared. During the meeting, often overlayed on a Google Meet: we help you take notes and action items, and email them out automatically for you. After: ML runs over your notes and generates insights about management blindspots. We then suggest questions/conversation starters for your next meeting to help to resolve them.

Finally, we’ve built a powerful goaling tool, complete with the largest library of goal/OKR examples on the internet (free here, broken up by role: https://hypercontext.com/goal-examples), that helps you collaborate, document, and discuss long-term goals every meeting before the urgent agenda topic.

Founders, CEOs, execs use our app all week to manage their job—mainly through their 1:1 and team meetings. We’re specifically helpful for folks who are doing a lot of context switching throughout their day and need to offload the “remember to talk to people about this” part of their brain.