The Manager’s Toolkit for Building a Team That Actually Excels
Smart, talented people don’t just want clear assignments—they want agency over their own goals, careers, and time. For people managers, the challenge is designing an environment where that kind of fulfillment can flourish without sacrificing momentum. Leaders at Uber, Twitch, Shopify, Oura Ring, and Work & Co. offer a set of practical tactics for doing exactly that.
Start with Priorities, Then Cut Them Down
Setting goals is only half the battle; the other half is making sure those goals are the right ones. At Uber, Director of Product Operations Jane Lee asks her team members to write down their priorities at the start of each quarter or half. The initial lists are typically bloated with 10 to 15 items, a product of an overachieving culture. Lee then has each person slash the list down to just three priorities. This forces a kind of strategic triage, helping people decide what they can realistically execute and nail within a specific timeframe.
Throughout this process, Lee steers team members toward projects that align with the company’s pressing strategic initiatives. “We try to make it as concrete and as quantitative as possible in terms of what impact they’re trying to drive,” she says. Once finalized, the goals are shared with product management directors and other leaders, keeping everyone aligned and accountable to a focused set of outcomes.
Ruthlessly Protect the Work Day
Constant meetings are the enemy of deep work. At design firm Work & Co., project teams limit themselves to a single daily check-in each morning to review the previous day’s work and align on next steps. The remainder of the day is reserved for solo work or asynchronous collaboration in shared files.
“The more meetings we have, the more time that takes away for teams to focus on what they're here to do, which is to make work they're proud of,” says Design Partner Casey Sheehan. The discipline lies in being ruthless about what truly warrants a synchronous meeting versus what could be resolved over Slack or in a collaborative workspace like FigJam.
For teams that can’t escape back-to-back meetings, Twitch has found a way to make them more intentional and equitable. Adapting Amazon’s famous six-page memo format for a hybrid world, meeting attendees read a shared document, take 10 to 15 minutes to annotate it with questions, and then discuss it. “This ensures equitable participation,” says VP of Product Jeremy Forrester. “It allows people who are not great in a 20-person meeting to have a voice.” The format ensures that the most outspoken voices don’t dominate and that quieter team members have a channel to contribute.
Make Experimentation Everyone’s Job
Overly prescriptive job descriptions can create turf battles and stifle innovation. At Oura Ring, VP of Growth Manbir Sodhia avoids this by making experimentation a core responsibility for everyone. “Everything can be an experiment. Any campaign, any project,” he says. “All good ideas start with a strong hypothesis. You can measure the outcomes, and you can decide whether you scale and rinse and repeat.”
This process prevents confusion about ownership—generating new ideas isn’t one person’s job—and opens a path for important work that doesn’t yet exist. It also gives people permission to take calculated risks. “It allows people to try something new,” Sodhia says. “It’s okay sometimes to step on toes and ask for forgiveness later. If you’re interested in making an impact, the company shouldn’t stop you.”
Map Out Career Trajectories
Career paths today are rarely linear, and in a remote environment, the informal networking that once fueled advancement—chance cafeteria encounters, after-work drinks—has largely evaporated. Managers need to be more deliberate about helping colleagues see their futures. Uber’s Jane Lee uses a Gaps Analysis template in her career conversations, a framework that explores where you are now, where you’d like to be, what’s standing in the way, and how to bridge the gap.
“Going off that, we make a six- to 12-month plan of what we want to accomplish,” Lee says. For high-aspiration employees, the conversation shifts to the specific skills needed to reach roles like COO or CPO. Visualizing the exact steps on a whiteboard or in a template makes a major promotion feel tangible and attainable, rather than a distant and insurmountable goal.
Balance as a Strategy, Not a Perk
Some companies are taking drastic structural measures to prioritize balance. When Vika Kovalchuk Zamparelli and Lindsay Liu founded the building software startup Super, they adopted a four-day work week from the outset. “We want to make sure that people are balanced and that we recognize they have lives greater than work,” Liu says. Meetings are confined to Mondays and Thursdays, leaving Tuesdays and Wednesdays clear for heads-down work.
The bet is that balance fuels velocity. “Balance is going to be our best way to maintain velocity,” Zamparelli says. Yet a four-day week isn’t a universal fix. Shopify experimented with the format, but UX Manager Sebastian Speier found it backfired. “While it was nice at first, my team eventually fell into the trap of trying to squeeze five days of work into four days per week, and everyone started to feel like their days were not long enough and that there were too many meetings,” he says. Shopify’s remote teams instead now break up the day with voluntary social gatherings in FigJam—virtual scavenger hunts and weekly wind-downs—which serve as a lighter-touch way to take employees’ minds off work without compressing the calendar.
