Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by oreaway 2112 days ago
I'd caution against memo culture, actually. I only have a sample size of 2, but in two organizations I've been in that tried to adopt something similar, this is what happened:

In the first org, there was a lot of pressure that any such memos had to be highly researched and data driven (also borrowed from Amazon, I imagine). In reality what this meant is that drafting a memo even for the smallest decisions or ideas became a large laborious effort, which nobody wanted to do and/or didn't have time to do it. The result was that everyone procrastinated on decision making, if they even participated in it in the first place, and I knew a fair share of colleagues who didn't even bother to pitch their ideas because of hating the memo system.

In the second org, it was the opposite problem: in an attempt to make memos "painless", there was much less pressure on making the memos "high quality". The result: every "memo" was a hastily scrawled together draft of random notes that didn't make much sense, and we had to spend most time in meetings going over the "memo" to decipher it and have the author explain it anyway.