Working in “lanes” is about deliberately structuring work into a few enduring streams with clear intent, ownership, and weekly learning loops, instead of chasing ad hoc tasks and frameworks.
You have to break down the right lanes.They can’t be too vague, but they can’t be too specific. Ideally, they are relatively independent. They should last a while, but you need to be willing to reshape the lanes or make the hard decision to retire one or pause it. They need owners as well—one or just a couple. Once you’ve got the lanes sorted out, it is really about the right habits. What are you going to do this week to move things forward? What happened last week? What are your near-term goals? Longer-term goals? What are your KPIs, and what can you realistically move? What’s getting in the way? It is pretty simple, actually. Most important: talking about it as a team or team of teams. Making decisions together.
Core ideas
- Shape a few lanes, not many: 3–5 main lanes that represent the key bets or levers to move outcomes, each with an understood risk profile, complexity, and experimentation level.
- Direction over tasks: Each lane gets a short intent (1–2 lines) describing strategy and purpose, while detailed tasks live underneath and evolve week to week.
- Real ownership: One to three true owners per lane who share genuine accountability, not just ceremonial “representatives.”
How the practice works
- Manual, persistent doc: Work is run from a single shared doc; every week the team copies lanes forward, updating what happened, what’s next, and what changed.
- Weekly/biweekly cadence: Frequent touchpoints keep drift visible; less frequent “big resets” are for reframing lanes in the context of larger bets.
- Just enough data: Each lane carries near-term work, influenceable metrics, lagging signals (goals, risks, value), and explicit carry-overs to make reasoning and tradeoffs easier.
Mindset behind it
- Work small, think big: Keep hard focus on what must move now, with soft focus on later, acknowledging a rolling cone of uncertainty where lanes will change or end.
- Discovery, not just execution: Designing the lanes is itself discovery work—co-designed, argued over, and iterated; the learning happens in the disagreements and adjustments.
- Human, not framework-first: Frameworks and “training-wheel-ified Agile” often obscure the hard parts; what matters is what you do, change, and learn, not the labels.
Leadership lessons
- Invisible labor: Good leaders quietly advocate for the team, protect the way of working when results are not immediate, and keep modeling habits instead of recentralizing credit.
- Staying close to the work: As you get more senior, lanes get broader and further away, but you cannot lose the ability to relate to people “in the thick of it” and to distinguish different lane types (0→1 vs later-stage).
- Expect slipping: Even strong leaders and teams sometimes let the practice become performative or drift; success is about recommitting, not maintaining perfection.
Practical checklist (8 steps)
- Define 3–5 lanes.
- Write a short intent for each lane.
- Assign 1–3 real owners to every lane.
- Add just enough info (near-term work, metrics, goals, risks, carry-overs).
- Keep lanes in one shared place and copy forward every cycle.
- Review frequently; plan deeper resets occasionally.
- Use depth-of-field: hard focus now, soft focus later.
- Refactor, pivot, or retire lanes as an ongoing practice.