One of the exciting things about going from “doing it all yourself” to “doing it mostly yourself with some help from employees” to “your employees do everything” is seeing the outcome and impact of what they’ve produced.
One of the interesting things to see is what employee contributions have a lasting impact – which becomes their legacy after they’ve left. They may have moved to another role, left the company, or “graduated” (our term for someone leaving to start their own company) – but what they’ve done for the company remains.
It’s interesting to see how much this can vary, and how it sometimes doesn’t always correlate to your impression of them while they’re in-seat. Customers and partners may continuously mention a past employee. Deliverables or documents they’ve produced are still used daily. Inside jokes and company tales, those little bits of glue that bonds us, still references them. Other times, the moment they walk out the door, you realize that there is little trace of them. Their work is quickly rendered irrelevant. Code gets overwritten.
I’m taking these learnings and starting to transfer that in – while one of our core values is progress over process – what is the actual enterprise value someone is bringing to our customers and our culture?
