My few most productive individual weeks at Anthropic have all been “crisis project management:” coordinating major, time-sensitive implementation or debugging efforts.

In a company like Anthropic, excellent project management is an extremely high-leverage skill, and not just during crises: our work has tons of moving parts with complex, non-obvious interdependencies and hard schedule constraints, which means organizing them is a huge job, and can save weeks of delays if done right. Although a lot of the examples here come from crisis projects, most of the principles here are also the way I try to run any project, just more-so.

I think excellent project management is also rarer than it needs to be. During the crisis projects I didn’t feel like I was doing anything particularly impressive; mostly it felt like I was putting in a lot of work but doing things that felt relatively straightforward. On the [...]

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Outline:

(01:42) Focus

(03:01) Maintain a detailed plan for victory

(04:51) Run a fast OODA loop

(09:31) Overcommunicate

(10:56) Break off subprojects

(13:28) Have fun

(13:52) Appendix: my project DRI starter kit

(14:35) Goals of this playbook

(16:00) Weekly meeting

(17:10) Landing page / working doc

(19:27) Plan / roadmap / milestones

(20:28) Who's working on what

(21:26) Slack norms

(23:04) Weekly broadcast updates

(24:12) Retrospectives

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.