Hi Reader,
"In the real world, when you don't have that clarity, you end up with the organization hallucinating."
Tim Barker is CEO of Attain IP — and before that, he ran a software company he scaled to eighty million in revenue with 600 people. Now he runs the next one with five people and seven teams of agents.
Here's why we should feel exposed, not impressed.
- The clearest parts of your business probably aren't written down. They live in someone's head — and that someone is often a single point of failure.
- Our people have been quietly translating fuzziness into work for years. We typically call those "good hires". Fact is - we're paying twice.
- Agents don't translate. They execute. So every fuzzy instruction we've gotten away with is about to come back as broken output — but at a totally different speed.
Tim had built this discipline before, while growing to 600+ people. When he started Attain IP, he realised it had to come first this time. Everywhere trust could break — between an instruction and the work, between a decision and the team, between ambition and the company you actually want — he clarifies it before the work runs.
Here's what he did radically differently:
- Define the work before anyone runs it
Most companies have job specs. They list responsibilities, experience, who you report to. Tim's doesn't. His defines decision boundaries, autonomy, authority, who you interact with, what outputs you produce. His job specs are like contracts. Work, limits, and outputs are all settled before anyone runs against them.
- Update the operating system weekly, not yearly
Most software CEOs build clarity once a year - for the January kickoff. Tim does it weekly. Every management meeting gets transcribed, agents read it, extract the decisions, and cascade them through the org. The operating model isn't a document anyone reads once — it's a feedback loop that updates itself.
- Build in your own correction
Most CEOs trust their own judgment on when growth crosses a line. Tim doesn't. He has guardian agents — one for trust, one for security, one for category — that sit alongside his growth agent and override it when it pushes too hard. Growth at any cost isn't what he's building. So he built something that holds the line for him.
For as long as I've been in business software, I've seen companies cut corners and explain it as ‘having to be pragmatic’. Tim's discipline removes the excuse, because now the technology is here, clarity works for us, and we can finally go the extra mile without needing 600 people to do it.
Click here to listen to the full interview with Tim.
Question for you to reflect upon:
What's the one part of your product you'd love to make remarkable — but you've quietly stopped trying, because the cost was too high?
The Remarkable Effect is... when magical replaces minimum.
Ton