Operations
Your AI stack is a liability until you write down how it works
Why an undocumented AI stack is debt: what context really means, governance without bureaucracy, a shared skills library over personal prompts, and an afternoon audit.
Category
Operations
Hiring, processes, and the daily work of running a team. The eighty percent of founder work that nobody puts on a slide.
20 articles
Articles in Operations
Operations
Seven weeks from first commit to shipped
What shipping in seven weeks requires: scope decided before starting, a single owner, cuts treated as the work, market pressure ignored, and a post-ship review that compounds.
Operations
Remote-first from day one
What remote-first requires from day one: writing things down, deciding asynchronously, and the deliberate choices that make a distributed company work rather than allowing it.
Operations
The build-versus-buy line for a services business
A services business hits a wall in year two. The fix is not a new tool stack — it is one honest line between the workflow that is the business and the rest.
Operations
The handful of contracts every founder should understand
The core contracts founders should understand before signing: what governs ownership, IP, and obligations, and why reading them yourself matters even with a lawyer.
Operations
Letting someone go without breaking the team
How founders let someone go without damaging the team: why waiting too long costs more, handling the exit with dignity, and what the people who stay learn from how you do it.
Operations
The founder's weekly review
Why founders need a weekly review: how one honest hour of reflection catches drift early, what to look at, and building the habit that keeps a company pointed the right way.
Operations
The job description that gets your first hire right
How founders write a first-hire job description that works: defining the real role, being honest about stage and scope, and screening for the person a small team actually needs.
Operations
The year after launch: owning, maintaining, and changing custom software
What non-technical founders should settle before launch: code and data ownership, a real handover, and maintenance terms that keep custom software an asset for years.
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.
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.