Ask HN: How much time of his time should a CEO in a 5 man team spend managing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much time of his time should a CEO in a 5 man team spend managing?

3 pointsmingyeow5 comments

Recently, I moved from a role whereby I spent 1/3 of my time doing coding and other low level stuff, 1/3 of my time doing biz dev, 1/3 of my time planning and managing to spending 2/3 of my time planning and managing (spending no time on low level stuff)

I FEEL that this is making the team much better, but I am not completely sure if i am being deluded.... any feedback?

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You code to execute vision, just as you step up a marketing campaign to execute a vision/strategy. If you're growing so fast that the coding can't catch up with the pace that your vision needs to be executed, give up coding and delegate it to someone else.

You feel you're not accomplishing anything because of "muscle memory"; your mind is used to feel accomplished when a build is complete and a test suite passes with flying colors. Your role has changed, and now you need to get your high from somewhere else. Feel free to go over what the team is doing a few times a day, but ultimately you will need to give up.

If you're feeling bored you probably are not doing all you could. Business responsibility is a hell of a burden and you should be able to visualize months into the future while your team is still at square one. It's not the same thing as a hack-mode, where you can shake off by scratching that itch and writing a toy app or a library.

Look harder into your market and competition and you will find something that you might have missed before that will keep you awake. 2/3, or 3/3 of the time left for management will feel like peanuts :-)

You feel you're not accomplishing anything because of "muscle memory" - this is a great insight - thanks a lot for that. Where did you get this phrase from?

It's my own observation. As a programmer, you are better equipped to arrive at insight through reflection better than most people, using your debugging and profiling skills ;-)

"Managing" and "planning" are distinct activities, and then there are a bunch of sub-activities that make up either.

In a 5-person startup team, you should spend virtually no time telling people what to do (i.e micromanaging). They should be able to figure that out for themselves. If they can't, you're probably screwed.

But there's a lot of work involved in figuring out customer requirements, breaking down those requirements into tasks that have to be done, covering bases that would otherwise be forgotten, and generally fretting so your team doesn't have to. If you're taking care of that so the rest of the team can worry about the low-level details of getting stuff done, that's valuable, and it's not unreasonable to expect that to take up 2/3 of a person in a 5-person team.

"If you're taking care of that so the rest of the team can worry about the low-level details of getting stuff done, that's valuable, and it's not unreasonable to expect that to take up 2/3 of a person in a 5-person team."

- THANKS a lot! that is enormously helpful and concise. Now I am kinda feeling better. =)

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