I work for an amazing company and we have accomplished some pretty impressive things. I like to say one of our secrets to success is the tempo we keep. We naturally balanced strategy and execution when I lived in LA: I would fly out to DC for a week every month or so and we would have a team huddle during that time when we would all come together in the office. Then I would go back to LA and others also would not come into the office as much even though they lived much closer.

This allowed us to have dedicated time for strategy and execution. If we were always together, we wouldn’t get anything done; conversely, if we didn’t sync like we did then we wouldn’t be aligned. I also think the timing made sense: 75-80% of our time was spent executing based on the 20-25% of the time strategizing and collaborating.

When I moved to DC we tried to keep the same tempo, but at a smaller scale: instead of repeating the cycle monthly, we did so weekly. I still only go into the office two times a week and those serve as our mini-huddles. We still have the whole team—we have grown quite a bit recently—get together at least once a quarter. And our tempo is still working for us.

As a side note, this balance also really set us up for success during the lockdown. Unlike other companies that had to learn how to transition to remote work, we were already in that groove. It was unfortunate we could no longer get together in person, but we already had all of our WFH tools in place so we hit the ground running from Day 1. But it certainly is nice to see coworkers in person again!