Juggling balls as a startup

I remember I read a post from my friend Abhay a few months ago about juggling balls in your career.

He mentioned that early on in your career, you admire the people that seem to always have their sh*t together. They have a ton of projects going on in parallel, and seem to easily handle everything. The most admirable part is that they never seem to drop a ball -- everything always moves across the finishing line

You work hard and learn from that. You do your best to take on as many projects as possible, keeping as many balls in the air as possible. Each time you add a proverbial ball, you find your scope increases, often accompanied by accolades and success.

The counter intuitive thing, though, is that as you get more and more senior, you realize that you only have 2 hands. There's a limit to how many jobs you (or your team) can juggle.

What do you do?

You have to make a judgement call. You have to let some balls drop. Not everything can (or even should!) get done.

It becomes an effort of ruthless prioritization -- sometimes you let a ball drop and realize it was a golden ball that should have been left in the air. Other times you keep a ball in the air and realize it's actually made of lead. All bad outcomes -- but instances for you to learn from.

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Startups push this analogy to the extreme. Imagine you are juggling 10 balls at the same time: Legal / HR / Sales / Marketing / Product / Eng / Design / Customer Service. You only have 6 hands (2 for each co-founder). Which 6 do you keep in the air? How do you effectively juggle them?

You prioritize sales.. and onboard 3 customers. YAY! Your revenue is up.. but wait, they want features you haven't built yet.

You prioritize product and eng and ship a few features really fast. YAY! The customers are happy.. but wait. There are a few bugs.

You prioritize eng and CX, and ship a few fixes really fast. YAY! Oh wait, shoot we missed our bi-weekly goal because we forgot to prioritize sales

This vicious and delicate cycle forces you to take a masterclass on prioritization. Without it you're dead in the water.