Every issue of Azimuth, in order.
Three questions from this month's inbox: a deadline nobody believes in, an apology that came too late, and a chat channel that runs all night.
We bought three products to replace one spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is still here, and it finally explained why.
Three questions from readers this month, answered in full.
A near-miss, twenty minutes from production, and the one process change that actually stuck afterward.
Months are a comfortable unit. They are also the wrong one.
Most decisions in a small team don't need a framework. The ones that do only need three questions.
We used to keep decisions in people's heads. That worked until the people changed.
Not because the amount was large. Because nobody owned the approval, so it drifted between three inboxes until someone finally asked out loud whose job this was.
Consolidation is not free. The tool we lost that we now miss most was the cheapest one - and the one nobody had bothered to evaluate before cutting it.
The best addition to a five-person team last year was someone who pushed back in the first interview. We almost didn't call her back for exactly that
Some information belongs in a tool. Some belongs on a wall everyone walks past. We stopped trying to make the whiteboard digital.
"How do you know you hired too fast?" You find out nine months later, when the person who should have caught it left already.
Some meetings exist to decide. Others exist to make a decision feel shared after the fact. Small teams need to know which one they are in.
Seven days, one shared document, and the uncomfortable discovery of how little we had actually agreed on.
