The Goal of This Post

This post distills lessons on urgency, clarity, and accountability from Amp It Up by Frank Slootman—practices for earning trust, gratitude, and loyalty from the clients we serve.

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Defining “Amp It Up”

• Raise your standards, pick up the pace, sharpen your focus and align your people.
• What you need on day one is to ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity.

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#1. Raise Your Standards

• Try applying “insanely great” as a standard on a daily basis and see how far you get.
• A clear and compelling sense of mission. A well-defined purpose.
• Every company should know exactly why it exists and what it’s trying to accomplish.
• Think about the future state you want to achieve and work backward to the present.
• Apply focus, urgency, and execution, and strategy.
• Teach your people to drive the business to the limits of its potential.
• If you want to win big, imagine a radically different future that is not tethered to the past.

Leaders have to channel the organization’s state of mind. They make sure everybody is dialed in, talking about the same things, and feeling the same sense of discomfort and anticipation.

#2. Align Your People and Culture

• The question is, Are we all pulling on the same oar? Are we all driving in the same direction?
• Increase your people’s sense of ownership so that they will act as owners.
• The culture needs to serve the mission of the enterprise. Align the culture with the mission.
• If you want to drive a more consistent set of behaviors, norms, and values, you have to focus on consistent and clearly defined consequences, day in and day out.

Celebrate people who own their responsibilities, take and defend clear positions, argue for their preferred strategies, and seek to move the dial.

#3. Sharpen Your Focus

Prioritize

• Think about execution more sequentially than in parallel.
• Work on fewer things at the same time, and prioritize hard.
• Get in the habit of constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing.

Analyze

• Slow down and critically examine situations and problems before settling on an explanation.
• Seek counsel outside of your direct environment.
• Break problems down into their most basic elements.

Focus on the Customer

• Customer success is the business of the entire company.
• Everyone’s incentives should be fully aligned with what’s good for our customers.
• Customer grievances are best solved by establishing proper ownership, reducing complexity, and removing bureaucratic intermediaries.

#4. Pick Up the Pace

• Leaders set the pace. Start compressing cycle times.
• Once the cadence changes, everybody moves quicker.
• Use every encounter, meeting and opportunity to increase the pace of whatever is going on.
• Apply pressure. Be impatient.
• Ask lots of questions to figure out what’s wrong. Take bold steps to mitigate the problem as soon as you understand it.
• When in doubt, lean in and try to grow faster.
• Fast growth separates great companies from their competition.
• Stay scrappy as you scale up. Hang on to your early-stage dynamism.
• Always be paranoid about what you are not doing but should be.

#5. Transform Your Strategy

• Widen the aperture of your thinking about the business model, to reach new and bigger markets.
• Develop a healthy sense of paranoia about your business model.
• Figure out all the alternative approaches are and make hard decisions about why some make more sense than others.
• The closer your early customers are, the more easily you can communicate with them and gather useful feedback.
• Build the whole product or solve the whole problem as fast as you can.
• Try to deliver a complete solution so you won’t be vulnerable to displacement.
• Think hard about the ideal architecture for your product before launch.
• Bet on the correct enabling technologies.

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On Leadership

• Become great at quickly figuring out what to keep, what to jettison, and what to fix.
• It is the role of leadership to maintain a culture of brutal honesty.
• Engage people in a genuine manner. Be interested, be responsive, be helpful whenever possible.
• Leaders must be trustworthy. You have to earn it.
• Words have consequences. People trust a straight shooter.
• People always monitor the variance between what you say and what you do.
• Acknowledge mistakes and seek to fully address the situation until you find the solution.
• Develop a style of communication that’s authentic to you.
• Have an endgame in mind. Play a short game and a long game simultaneously.
• Be your own person. Steer your own ship. Never put your personal decisions to a vote.
• Make the most of your unique aggregate of experiences.
• Focus intensely on delivering value for your customers.

Clarity is key. Good leadership requires a never ending process of boiling things down to their essentials.

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All content credit goes to the author(s). I’ve shared the bits I’ve enjoyed the most and found most useful.

Cheers ’til next time! Saludos!
Alberto