Make it a priority
One of the biggest pitfalls growing companies face is trying to
do more than is really possible. Tirado avoids this pitfall by keeping his goals realistic. He works with his staff to carefully calibrate
how much growth can occur with a given amount of investment.
“I’m all for stretching my organization, but you have to listen
carefully to your managers reporting to you, and maybe even one
level below,” he says.
You have to gather this information from your employees
because that is your key to finding out which tasks employees are
struggling to accomplish. If an employee has too much work on his
or her plate, you can simplify the situation by creating a priority
list.
If the company’s priorities are clear, your employees will
know how to make the trade-offs when not everything can get
done.
“As a technology company, we tend to have a larger appetite than
we can go off and execute,” Tirado says. “If
you’re very clear that there’s a prioritization of the things that need to get done,
then people can go look at that and say,
‘I’ve got to make a trade-off of my time, and
according to this prioritization scheme,
this is what I should be working on.’”
Tirado has a set process for determining
the priority level of tasks for his employees. There are several factors involved in
the process. For instance, if the pure monetary return of one product is higher than
another product, that will be factored into
the priority list.
Also, Tirado takes the strategic value of a
product into consideration when determining priority. If a product or process would
open a new market in a place where the
company was not firmly established or if it
would create a new set of customers for
the company, those factors would be taken
into consideration, as well.
It’s not all so cut and dry, however.
Sometimes, you have to consider options
that have no short-term monetary return
but will pay off two or three years down
the line.
“You’ve got to be careful in your prioritization process,” Tirado says. “Because if
you only look at the quickest return on dollars, for a technology company that could
spell trouble because you’ve got to constantly be looking for the breakout or the
novel way of attacking a problem that is
going to be enough to get people to be
interested in buying not just the current
generation but future generations.”
Tirado solves that problem by keeping a
healthy mix of products and ideas that are
going to result in a shorter- to mid-term revenue or profit, while also investing in some
longer-term risky ideas.
Tirado says experience has shown him
that if you make all of your longer-term
plans low priority, you won’t have enough
new ideas to sustain the company’s growth.
There’s always some disagreement among
the management team as to whether the
order of the list is exactly right. But Tirado
says you need to listen to every point and
counterpoint because if a department is
overcommitted or if there is a contention
for resources somewhere in your organization, your employees will look to your
prioritization scheme to dictate what gets
done first.
