No. 17 · Work

You'll be measured by the agents you manage

You used to be valued by how many people you managed, and how effective you were with them. Headcount was the scoreboard — "she runs a team of forty" meant something.

Now it's going to be about how many agents and workflows you can manage. Same skill underneath — delegating, checking the work, raising the bar — pointed at software instead of people.

The old scoreboard

Manager of people

Headcount on the org chart
1:1s, reviews, meetings about meetings
Output caps at the size of the team

Growth meant hiring, and hiring was the bottleneck.

The new scoreboard

Manager of agents

Workflows shipped and running
Agents working while you sleep
Output caps at what you can imagine and check

Growth means wiring another workflow — this afternoon.

The shift — the management skill survives, the direct reports change

I ended the tweet with a real question: what are the big workflow ideas we should be building? Here's my running list — the first three are already live, links included.

The open workflow list

Inventory to everywhere — a car lands on the lot, and by the afternoon it's posted on four platforms. Built: the dealership social machine.
The job hunt — scrape every board, score every match against your profile, daily. Built: the job-hunting machine.
The portfolio brief — your watchlist, summarized with prices, news and sentiment every morning. Built: the investing update machine.
Call to proposal — a sales call transcript goes in, a formatted proposal comes out before the prospect gets home.
Review desk — every new Google review answered in your voice within the hour, flagging the ones that need a human.
The weekly numbers — one email every Monday pulling sales, traffic and ad spend from every tool you use, with the deltas that matter.

Six workflows — three live, three up for grabs

The pattern across all of them: find something a person does weekly out of obligation, wire it to run daily out of habit. Each one you ship becomes a direct report that never quits.

The list is open on purpose. If you have a big one, reply on the tweet — the good ones get built.

And the way to get there is reps. Build things. Create a workflow for a website that runs itself — email going out daily, social posts daily, a validation layer checking the work. The ones who know how to do it will be the ones doing it.

Stop counting direct reports. Start counting workflows.

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