Operations
Performance reviews for small teams: the minimum viable version
Most small teams copy enterprise review systems that are already broken. The fix is a weekly check-in and a quarterly forward-looking conversation.
Category
Operations
Hiring, processes, and the daily work of running a team. The eighty percent of founder work that nobody puts on a slide.
11 articles
Articles in Operations
Operations
The end-of-week ritual: patterns from operator newsletters
Why operator newsletters from Jason Fried to Lenny Rachitsky independently converged on the same Friday review ritual, and how to make it work for your team.
Operations
Project management tools: what teams settle on after the churn
Engineering converges on Linear, cross-functional work lands in Notion, and operations-heavy teams keep ClickUp, Monday, or Asana. The split is cultural, not technical.
Operations
Multi-currency payroll across MENA
Why MENA payroll is structurally harder than US or EU payroll, and the three-rail stack operators converged on to solve it.
Operations
The 30-day onboarding plan: patterns from public playbooks
Public onboarding playbooks converge on a four-week structure: context, then a small ship, then real work, then review. Here is the pattern and how it scales down.
Operations
Documentation people actually read
Most internal documentation fails because it is written for a future onboarder who reads top to bottom, not for the busy colleague using search.
Operations
Outsourcing vs in-house: the math at scale
Why the outsource-vs-in-house decision is a coordination question, not a cost question, and how to find the real inflection point.
Operations
All-hands meetings: who killed them and why
Why the all-hands meeting is disappearing from mid-stage companies and what replaces it: recorded updates, written memos, and async video.
Operations
The first regrettable hire: a pattern study
Founders' first regrettable hire follows a predictable shape. A pattern study drawn from startup literature and founder interviews.
Operations
How to hire your first ten people without a recruiter
A practical guide to making your first ten hires as a founder — no recruiter, no HR department, no budget for either. Includes MENA-specific notes on pay and sourcing.
Operations
What a ten-person team's tech stack actually looks like in 2026
What software a ten-person product team actually runs on in 2026, with monthly costs, and the parts nobody usually admits to.