Management For Startups Podcast
© 2025 Cedric Chin1
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When you're moving to a new role — be it as an individual contributor to a manager, or a manager to another part of the organisation — your move is often fraught with uncertainty. This week,...
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- 6 years ago
14:13
Why is it that certain people can't seem to get better at management? Why are there so many bad managers out there? A year or so ago, I came across the first plausible explanation for this o...
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- 6 years ago
14:54
In our last episode, we talked about transitioning from a physical workplace to a remote work configuration. This week's episode is about taking care of yourself before you take on the respon...
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- 6 years ago
14:50
Many of us are stuck working from home this week, as the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps across the globe. This week's episode is about managing your team from this position — especially if you're ...
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- 6 years ago
14:41
Idea bombs, or founder bombs is the tendency for you to tell your subordinates about this great big idea you have, and then distract them from execution. In this episode, we explore three met...
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- 6 years ago
14:49
In my previous episode about my new book, Keep Your People, I mentioned that 'mission is an overrated tool for employee retention'. This was a throwaway comment that I realise should properly...
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- 6 years ago
13:40
I launched Keep Your People — The Startup Manager's Guide to Employee Retention last Friday, and the book is available on the MFS website here. In this episode of the MFS podcast, we cover a ...
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- 6 years ago
14:44
Giving good instructions is difficult! This week, we look at 'executive intent', an adaptation of 'Commander's Intent', a technique that was developed by the US Army for better, clearer instr...
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- 7 years ago
13:32
We spend a great deal of time as managers forming accurate models of the people we work with. It's important to resist the urge to stick to the first narrative we generate. This episode, we ...
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- 7 years ago
13:45
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos popularised the idea of 'disagree and commit' in his 2016 shareholder's letter. It's a fascinating idea, but it isn't the most common form of 'disagree and commit' that ...
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- 7 years ago
11:48
We all have down days. When you're an individual contributor, this isn't so bad. But when you're a manager, your entire team depends on you. How do you deal with motivational issues when you'...
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- 7 years ago
14:47
This week we deal with the challenge many makers — programmers, designers, hardware engineers — face when they make the leap to management. How do you wake up in the morning to go to work whe...
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- 7 years ago
14:54
If you're a middle manager, dealing with your boss is going to be one of the main things that you'll have to learn to do. This week, we'll talk about a fundamental technique that every manage...
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- 7 years ago
14:55
One of the implications of the manager's job of 'increasing the output of the team' is to serve as the 'shit shield' for said team. This means protecting them from the natural randomness of e...
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- 7 years ago
15:29
In Kim Scott's 2017 management book Radical Candor, Scott describes a management technique that she attributes to ex-Google manager Russ Laraway, who had to integrate the Doubleclick team pos...
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- 7 years ago
14:57
We've talked about delegation before on the MFS podcast, but one thing that I've neglected to mention is that it's important to 'explain why' when delegating to subordinates. Explaining 'why'...
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- 7 years ago
13:20
Process change is something that is inevitable at every startup. This week we look at a general template for introducing process change, and two ways of evaluating an impending change you're ...
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- 7 years ago
14:50
Last week we discussed the dangers of firing too slowly. This week we'll discuss the dangers of the opposite view: that of firing too quickly. In my experience, startup managers who fire too ...
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- 7 years ago
14:58
We've discussed the difficulty of firing bad performers in the past — in the last episode on the Manager Ugh Field, for instance, I illustrated the ugh field with a personal story on the diff...
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- 7 years ago
14:47
The Manager Ugh Field is what you feel when you're facing a difficult situation at work. Your brain throws up a deflector shield to force your attention away from a difficult action, conversa...
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- 7 years ago
14:41
The Manager's Job is the core of MFS's management philosophy. But I recently realised that The Manager's Job could be interpreted negatively — that is, be used to justify output at any costs....
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- 7 years ago
14:42
This week's episode is about a heuristic we used at my old role. Basically: "if you can't train a given subordinate, let them go." This heuristic governed the way we thought about our probati...
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- 7 years ago
14:29
Seymour Papert's life work was about how humans learnt. We look at his big idea — knowledge construction — and draw on it to learn how to become a better trainer, and therefore a better manag...
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- 7 years ago
13:58
The Fundamental Attribution Error is a cognitive bias from social psychology — one that affects our interactions with other people, and one that everyone is vulnerable to. This week, we talk ...
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- 7 years ago
13:45
The positional power barrier is my name for the power differential between manager and subordinate. It affects nearly every interaction you'll have with your people, and it can be quite insid...
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- 7 years ago
13:47
What's the optimal number a manager should have? The most common answer to this question is 7±2. But why is this the case, and why is it important to know one's limits? This week, we explore ...
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- 7 years ago
14:01
This episode marks the end of the mini-series 'The Bare Minimum You Need to Know to Be An Adequate Manager'. We close with a summary of the techniques we've learnt over the past eight episode...
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- 7 years ago
14:32
Hopefully you're convinced by now that doing one-on-ones is useful and potentially valuable to your management practice. In this episode, we cover the 3 kinds of one-on-ones that you'll expe...
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- 7 years ago
14:54
In this episode, we cover the little details about actually doing one-on-ones. How do you determine the best frequency for your team? What goes into a typical one-on-one? What are some princi...
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- 7 years ago
14:53
One-on-ones get a lot of flak — both inside and outside the tech industry. What are they good for, and why even do them? I tell two stories that hopefully highlight what one-on-ones are good ...
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- 7 years ago
14:44
Prioritisation will make the biggest difference to your ability to remain sane as a manager. The most important side effect of learning prioritisation is to gain the ability to say no to cert...
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- 7 years ago
14:38
The Manager's Job is a lens through which one may understand all of management. In this episode, we discuss the downstream implications of this framework, and how it helps when thinking about...
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- 7 years ago
13:56
In the last episode, we talked about how training and delegation are two halves of the same process. In this episode, we explore how to do training in service of better delegation — the basic...
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- 7 years ago
14:53
We know delegation can be done badly — the English language has a word to describe bad delegation: micro-management. Why is it that new managers sometimes micro-manage, even when they know it...
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- 7 years ago
14:56
Management for Startups is a podcast dedicated to the new manager on the startup treadmill. In this episode, we discuss the goal of the podcast, and talk about the focus for the next six to e...
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- 7 years ago
12:48
Description
The Management for Startups Podcast is a weekly show by Cedric Chin that covers the basics of management for startups, small teams, and organisations between 2-50 people. The goal is to produce a complete resource for new managers on the startup treadmill.
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