“Ordered Chaos” — My management style

Someone has recently asked me to describe my management style, which reminded me of a conversation I had with one of my co-workers about that. I have decided to put it in writing, so here is what I call Ordered Chaos.

The essence of Ordered Chaos

As everything in life, this too is a balance between two opposite forces:

For me Chaos is a metaphor for the energetic startup world — doing things fast, the need for quick decisions, releasing killer features in order to beat the market, and all the adrenaline around it.

Order is doing things slower while putting time and effort into planning, drilling down into details, writing design documents, having a formal review process, etc.

I don’t appreciate doing things without any thought, and that’s where Order comes into play, but I do believe that in order for a startup to succeed you must always be in hyper-drive, hence the Chaos.

Some examples of how this translates for me in real life

• It’s OK to quickly go and implement a feature every now and then, but give it SOME thought before rushing to the keyboard, do a “back of an envelope design” (kind of a design sketch) and think about the bigger picture of the feature
• I like research, i think it’s important, but there comes a point where putting more time into it isn’t effective anymore. Let’s say you have 5 different options for open source libraries to use for a specific purpose. You narrow them down to the top 2 but not sure which one to choose. In that case just pick one and go with it; if in the future we’ll find out that a rewrite is needed, so be it.
• Always starting with the MVP of a feature ensures that you are nimble enough to change it after you get feedback from your customers. Oh, and now that we’ve mentioned it — feedback is the most important thing you can wish for in order to fine tune or even pivot your product, make sure you constantly get it.
• Empower your developers to be independent and able to take a feature from idea to implementation on their own (while using the needed resources from the company like PM/other teams). In the long run you get a stronger R&D team and happier employees.

I guess it all boils down to balance.
Do you also have your own Order and Chaos? What are those?