Page 37 of The Hard Launch

“And don’t tell me everyone’s a high performer, Jude,” he says.

The most regrettable thing about the business lessons Edmund teaches me is that even when they do have value—looking at you, low-potential low-performer Keith—I feel like being honest with Edmund will just bite me in the ass. I’m incentivized to do it in bad faith, because telling him that I hired a bowl of oatmeal as a CTO will only cause problems for me.

Edmund also has a list of other reports he wants, data on active users and attrition from the past two years. I plan to ask Lacey to pull them for me, but before I have a chance to, Amber comes in my office. She’s only part-time so she frequently forgets I don’t have a door; she’s always crabby about this when she tries to close it.

“Walk or whisper?” I offer.

“I was copied on the reporting requests from Edmund,” she whispers.

“Yeah, I saw.”

“And he copied you on all the reports he’s requesting from me.”

I nod and she sighs.

“Jude, this is the information people look at during due diligence. As in, before an acquisition.”

“I’m aware,” I tell her. “But I think it’s just in case. There’s not a deal on the table or anything.”

I can’t tell if she thinks I’m inspiring or delusional, but she offers to slow-walk her reports to see just how antsy Edmund gets about them. I thank her, though I’m not sure I want to know the results of her little experiment. I decide to pull all my reports myself, to avoid any questions from Lacey.

I meet with Keith, Dave, and Ingrid, where I ask them to bring on two or three contractors, then suggest Ingrid might take over some of my work on the tiger team. This is not at Edmund’s behest; this is a place where I realize he has a point. If I’m coding instead of CEOing, I’m failing. Plus I’ve already set all the patterns and worked through the riskiest bits. It shouldn’t be too difficult a transition if we can get smart people on it.

Keith decides to take this opportunity to speak for fifteen minutes about the Mythical Man Month and his mixed experiences with offshore developers. I should have interrupted him when he began, but I didn’t think he’d go on for this long. When he’s finally done, Dave tells me his friend just started at an agency we can use, and Ingrid says she’s looking forward to taking on new responsibilities. We wrap early.

I go refill my water bottle, and on my way back I stop at Lacey’s desk.

“Hey,” I say.

“Good morning,” she says. We look at each other longer than we ought to, but Trevor’s not in yet to notice.

“So my last meeting ended early. If you have time maybe we can catch up before we meet with the team?”

She picks up her laptop. “I’ll walk with you.”

I start off by telling her about the changes I’m making, how I’ll be shedding some of the tasks that have been pushing me down into the weeds. Contractors aren’t ideal, but I need to focus on big picture problems. It’s in everyone’s best interest.

“Even yours?” She frowns at me from across the table. “You’re giving away all the pieces you care about. The ones you’re best at.”

“It’s what needs to happen,” I tell her, with some finality in my voice, because I don’t have time to go back and forth about this all morning. “How about you walk me through this release.”

She blinks at me, and I can practically see the dots as she’s composing a message for me in her head. But she doesn’t say anything, instead sets up a screencast to the big monitor and gives me a preview of what we’ll discuss in the next meeting. Her team is preparing to push their first release to beta, where actual users—Lacey’s Colony—will start using the new platform. As she’s walking me through the pages on the dev server, I see very quickly another downside to sleeping with one of your subordinates. Turns out it can make it complicated when you need to give constructive criticism the next day.

“You don’t love it,” she tells me, just from the look on my face.

“I don’t need to love it.”

“Are you sure about that?”

I sigh. “Parts of it feel half-baked. A little sloppy.”

She sits back in her chair. Dave and Ingrid wander in.

“Imagine that,” Lacey says. “A thing we’re working night and day on to deliver in an absurdly short amount of time, and it isn’t the most elegant solution in the world.”

Dave pretends he forgot something at his desk. Ingrid mumbles something about going to find the QA engineers, and follows him.

“You don’t need to be combative about it,” I tell her.