Management and Real-Time Strategy

Managing a startup organization can sometimes feel like you're playing a real-time strategy game (RTS) with 2500ms latency. Every decision takes a day, or a week, or even months for functional units within the organization to acknowledge and execute. As your tech startup scales in head count and as markets evolve, your organization may start to show signs of strategic dissonance. There's a concept in RTS called APM (actions per minute). Most professional Starcraft players can sustain 300 apm throughout the game and during intense battles can burst up to 500 apm. To put this into perspective, beginners usually sustain at 50 apm. In real-time strategy, the ability to make quick decisions based on game state and effectively achieve results can decide whether you win or lose. If we relate the concept to a typical Series A technology startup, it could look like this: The most important part of this diagram are the lightning bolts. These lightning bolts represent lines of communicati