This post about Marissa Mayer’s company Sunshine on Platformer is several months old, but I saw it linked again this week and wanted to highlight something:

Employees say they learn what they are working on each week during Monday morning standup meetings, and that their mandate shifts frequently as Mayer changes priorities.

This sounds exactly like how I run Micro.blog, actually. Founder mode, I guess? It sounds chaotic and “bad” but it’s also a strength of a very small team to change our minds quickly.

Ryan Mikulovsky

that sounds right 😅

Brian Christiansen

just curious, have you ever publicly shared a roadmap of where you’d like to take your service?

Kimberly Hirsh

Isn’t this what agile is meant to be? It sounds like Sunshine had/has other problems.

Manton Reece

@KimberlyHirsh For sure. There are so many photo sharing apps, not an easy market to break into either.

Leon Mika

Sounds like the place I work at now, except we don’t get the luxury of knowing what we’re doing every Monday. Priorities change with the wind. Not for everyone, but found myself not hating it as much as I expected.

Kimberly Hirsh

@pratik yeah, the only thing I thought made sense, and only in the hands of a super small organization like Micro.blog, is being able to determine what to work on flexibly and shift as-needed. The rest sounds Very Bad, and the bigger the team, the more planning you need.

Ryan Booker

I don’t think you can take that paragraph out of context like that. 🤣

The article doesn’t appear to describe anything positive—perhaps positively toxic.

It’s certainly not what I understand you to be describing or how I’ve heard you talk about developing Micro.blog before…

Manton Reece

@ryanbooker Yeah, my comment started as a joke, then turned more serious. Although I’m sort of annoyed with articles that kick a company’s leadership while they’re down, as if management mistakes explain everything.

Manton Reece @manton
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