As kids, we played a game on the playground called telephone. A sentence got whispered around a circle, person to person, until by the time it reached the last kid, the message was unrecognizable. Everyone laughed.
I didn’t expect that game to explain so much about running a company. The reason telephone works as a game is that every person in the circle has to interpret what they heard before passing it on, and interpretation is where things get lost. It’s dawned on me in the last two years that’s exactly what was happening with software at my own company. An idea would pass from the person who understood the problem, to whoever wrote it up, to whoever eventually got around to coding it, reinterpreted at every stop, until months later what shipped was a few degrees off from what we originally meant. Nobody did this on purpose. It’s just what happens when turning an idea into software requires many hands.
Then one weekend, my VP of product skipped all of that. It was for an entirely new business line, something we’d talked about for over a year but never got around to writing an engineering ticket for. He built it himself, in a single day, using Lovable. He called me on a Sunday night to show me working software.
He didn’t tell the idea to anyone. When the person who understands a problem can also build the solution, there’s no one left to whisper it to, so nothing gets lost.
As a CEO, I’ve realized it’s my job to make that the norm rather than a one-off. With automation, fewer good ideas get lost in the distance between the person who has them and the customers they’re for. Employees get to own the problems they’re closest to, and companies get more of what its people can do.
The person who starts the game of telephone is now the one who finishes it.
