Decentralizing decision making

We were joined by Adam Bly, Founder & CEO at System. Adam asks, why haven’t we seen it all connected yet?

At 12:12, Adam speaks about primitives for leaders:

Adam shared how he learned from Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify – the importance of decentralizing as much of the decision making as possible to increase speed, autonomy, and ownership regardless of the size of a team.

This puts a great deal of emphasis on the primitives that you feel are important for every leader in the company and then for their teams to really embrace that, understand and make sure people really get it. This empowers teams to be agile, to be squads, and go off and do their thing.

We put a great deal of emphasis at System on a set of first principles that govern how we think about the product and technology, and then tensions that shape any major decision.

We put a great deal of emphasis on our values and talk a lot about those and use those as primitives when we’re making product decisions or technology decisions.

We also put a great deal of emphasis on the use of data broadly in the company to inform our decision making.

By really equipping everybody with those three things that we talk about from day one onward through professional development, 1:1s, and everything at System, it allows for a high degree of ownership, autonomy, and distributed decision making around the company.