Your Implicit Management Contract
At Koyote Science, LLC, we have perfected our approach to project and team management to ensure that we consistently deliver terrific results on time and with substantial communication to help your business succeed. We accomplish this by employing a number of strategies that form our implicit management contract, which we discuss below.
Our Planning Schedule
Project planning occurs on three levels. At the top, we break each project up into one-month sprints (here, we show a project covering three months). In the middle, each sprint covers a group planning meeting, weekly one-on-ones, and weekly stand-ups (not shown).
At the end of each sprint, we conduct two additional group review meetings covering stakeholder deliverables and self-reflection for improving our process in the future. At the bottom, each one-on-one follows a similar format to identify and remove blockers, review the pace of deliverables, and to discuss each employee’s career goals and how they fit into the larger picture.
We make a commitment to our employees to provide a stable structure that allows us to work efficiently while providing frequent check-ins to quickly identify blockers and clear them out of the way. Above, we outline our approach to time management and the meetings we intend to run on a weekly basis.
In addition to planning and review meetings, each week we hold a 1-on-1 with each employee. We also hold group stand-ups at a cadence agreed to by the team. Both stand-ups and 1-on-1s follow a similar structure, broken down in review, planning, and career Q&A. Depending on organizational needs and structure, we may also include bi-weekly research and cross-organizational meetings to bridge organizational expertise. These meetups are some of our favorites, since they foster creative brainstorming and give everyone a chance to shine.
Our planning philosophy
Each project is planned with three tiers of deliverables: baseline goals which are required from each employee, Intermediate goals that are expected, and reach goals that motivate our employees and open up potential new opportunities. Since the results of each tier inform the ones above it, we encourage each employee to work from the bottom to the top.
When planning our projects, we make deliverables clear and actionable. We never say “this is how you should have done it” unless we include ourselves in that discussion. Rather, we focus on the future and brainstorm how to improve our processes. We break down each deliverable into three segments based on our expectations. And since we cover a career Q&A with each one-on-one, we ensure that our deliverables are discussed in their proper context.
We have a bias to action: If there’s a 99% solution at 50% labor, and the project allows for tolerance, we encourage our employees to go for it, outlining potential drawbacks and establishing a robust testing process to catch potential issues. The more quickly and confidently we can work through our goals without having to backtrack, the more quickly we get access to the questions that drive serious business impact. Decisions are argued through white papers that are shared with the company so that anyone can comment and contribute.
Providing Feedback
One mechanism we cherish is the compliment sandwich, in which critical feedback is framed with compliments recalling an employee’s successful experiences and competencies. Humans are emotional creatures, and our ability to act on feedback is directly proportional to how capable we feel. Since we are only able to access memories and projections into the future that are based on our current emotional state, the compliments help our collaborators enter into a positive frame of mind, allowing them to access resources that are otherwise locked away in negative thinking. In reality, the compliment sandwich is just a zoomed-in perspective of how great products and services are built, with compliments forming the mortar that glues together feedback and allows us to build higher.
Everyone, no matter how competent or experienced, is going to make mistakes. It’s how we handle them that defines our capabilities. At Koyote Science, LLC, when a mistake occurs, we document clearly how and why it happened, and brainstorm together what are the best processes we can implement to avoid those mistakes in the future. We then communicate those decisions to our stakeholders to build confidence and trust.
Traceable Decision Making
Koyote Science is founded on automating decision-making at all levels of business by providing transparency and visibility into our process. This is just as true for our production-first AutoML products as it is for our internal processes. We consider shareable, group-edited documents to be a primary work product in addition to the models and technology we deliver, allowing stakeholders to dive as deeply as they want into our decision-making process. We ensure each document is headed by a succinct TL;DR covering our action items and conclusions so that we can quickly organize our thoughts in the future, and since no choice is made without compromise, we always put the positive and negatives up and front to make downstream work easier and more efficient.
While many of our meetings are free-form, planning and research meetings take a specific structure: we spend the first half reading, commenting, and discussing around a white paper covering today’s agenda, and the second half planning and arriving at clear, succinct action items to act on what we have learned together. We then augment our shareable documents with what we have decided together, so that anyone will be able to go back to our document and understand why we made the decisions we did.
Building Strong Relationships
At Koyote Science, LLC, each employee, manager, and executive is responsible for building strong relationships with their juniors, peers, superiors and stakeholders. Our relationships require us to be in equal parts mentors, editors, and navigators to our colleagues as well as co-learners and advocates.
To build strong relationships, we understand that workplace conflict may occur while working together to build great things. Conflict isn’t a failure, but rather an opportunity to understand each other better. We have worked hard to build the right skills to mediate conflict and ensure that we grow from these experiences to build trust at the personal and corporate levels. Below, we discuss the texts that have had the biggest impact on our approach.
Recommended Books
Our strategies are formed from years of experience and a library of books with stellar insights into project planning, development, and management. We strongly encourage anyone we work with to give these books a read, since they give you super-powers for managing yourself and difficult conversations with your peers, superiors, and reports, as well as eliciting the optimal “flow” state of creative work that keeps us motivated and excited to wake up each morning.
We believe everyone on our staff is a psychologist and designer, whether you’re building user interfaces, tangible products, algorithms, or presenting your content to your stakeholders. The same principles apply across many fields, and flesh out the intuitive and aesthetic counterpart to our technical prowess. We recommend the following books to keep building out these abilities: