ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT For Stripe, this has minimized the number of people who aren’t sure if they can make a decision on their own or not. And it’s minimized the time they spend checking with their managers and getting validation. Combined, this has saved signiifcant time and resources for the company. Using this framework to empower decision making has also been replicable and scalable. Employees who are familiar with it can now pattern match which types of decisions require which types of actions — without predicting every single type of decision that could be made in advance. “This is very high leverage for us,” says Johnson. “There are many companies out there that get really into decision rights — like who’s allowed to decide what based on seniority or role. In my experience, this doesn’t work when you need to move and grow fast. I’ve been at companies where people will say, ‘Talk to these three people and then you can go ahead and decide.’ Those three people inevitably become a bottleneck, and a bunch of other people feel like they don’t truly have ownership of their work.” To grow successfully, you need to keep pushing the ability to make decisions down through the ranks, so that the people closest to the work can make high- quality, responsible calls. Stripe makes it a priority to localize decision making as much as possible. Not localizing problem-solving is a secret killer of companies. “If you don’t consistently teach more and more people how to make the decisions or ifnd resolutions consistent with your company’s goals, you’re going to stall out,” says Johnson. “Trust saves a huge amount of time.” Nearly all of the questions you should ask before you scale are about making trust central to your company’s operations. As a founder, can you trust hundreds of people — including many new people every month — to do their work the way you would do it? You’ll only be able to answer yes if you trust their judgment, and the only way to trust their judgment is to — above all — hire well. Beyond that, provide the people you’ve hired with the information, resources, tools, and mental models they need to understand your priorities, intent and objectives. 76