More on Responsibility Bundles

In last week’s brownbag, I compared management to property rights. To recap: Property isn’t a unitary thing (like an apple - if you eat it, no one else can) but a bundle of rights and obligations that we hold in common but parse out and package into convenient labels like “homeowner.” Work roles work the same way - they’re bundles of rights and responsibilities for functions that we hold in common as a company that are grouped into customary titles like CEO or Head of HR.

So, what are some of the “sticks” in these bundles and what does it mean for going horizontal? Here’s how I’m thinking about it (and I welcome your thoughts, too – let’s discuss!):

1. Leadership: influence, vision, and taking ownership. This includes modeling values, inspiring others toward shared goals, taking initiative on problems you see, and helping the team navigate challenges.
2. Management: facilitating process and systems. This covers planning, resource allocation, workflow coordination, risk management, and ensuring operational efficiency. You can manage projects, budgets, or processes without supervising people.
3. Supervision: Setting expectations, providing feedback, conducting performance reviews, coaching development, and ensuring people have what they need to succeed.
4. Decision-making authority: The power to make binding decisions at different levels (operational, tactical, strategic). This is distinct from management because you can have decision rights without managing processes.
5. Domain ownership: Being accountable for specific areas of knowledge or skill. Maintaining standards, answering questions, and guiding others in your domain.
6. External representation: Speaking for the team/company to outside stakeholders, customers, partners, or the public. This ambassadorial role can exist at many levels.
7. Partnership development: Building and nurturing strategic relationships. Identifying opportunities for collaboration, negotiating agreements, and maintaining ongoing partnerships.
8. Resource stewardship: Control over budgets, tools, or other resources. Different from management because it’s specifically about allocation authority.
9. Resource acquisition: Securing funding, tools, talent, or other resources. This includes fundraising, recruiting, procurement, and building the case for resource needs.
10. Culture building: Actively shaping team norms, practices, and “how we work together.” This goes beyond leadership’s vision-setting to the day-to-day reinforcement of values.
11. Innovation/Improvement: Responsibility for driving new ideas, challenging status quo, and improving processes. Not just executing but actively seeking better ways.
12. Information brokering: Ensuring critical information flows between people and teams. Being a connector and translator across boundaries.
13. Quality assurance/Standards enforcement: Being responsible for maintaining quality standards, compliance, or regulatory requirements. Different from domain ownership because it’s about enforcing standards across work rather than owning knowledge.
14. Conflict resolution/Mediation: The responsibility to help resolve disputes and facilitate difficult conversations, both first-person and for others.
15. Strategic planning: Long-term thinking and roadmapping, i.e. the concrete work of translating vision into actionable plans.
16. Risk assessment/Mitigation: Identifying potential problems before they happen and developing contingency plans. Different from management because it’s specifically focused on future risks.
17. Mentoring: Actively developing others’ skills and careers. Different from supervision because your “customer” in mentoring is the mentee. Mentoring is about assisting self-reflection, not about advice-giving from a position of seniority.

When I was at Enterprise Community Partners, we used to talk about “leading from your seat” – the idea that everyone can lead from their position by bringing ideas forward, mentoring colleagues, and figuring out how to meet the mission. But there’s more to it than ‘leadership’ – every job has some mix of these sticks in different quantities, and ‘management’ and ‘quality’ and all the others are just as important.

And I think the difference between hierarchical and horizontal management is that in horizontal management, we recognize:

• The customary combination of responsibilities aren’t law of nature – we can choose to mix and match them to fit our needs and values
• Supervision is a communal responsibility – we ALL assess whether the work someone is doing is helping the company.
• The bundle should fit the person, not just the job description. This allows folks to inhabit the role in the way that best fits them and the situation
• Adaptation goes both ways: bundles can fit folks’ talents and inclinations, but people also need to stretch and grow

To me, that is the recipe for greater autonomy for everyone. Whaddayathink?

Metrics

Traction

• Unique Buildings: 6,794 (Jul, +68 MoM)
• Annual Run Rate: $1.499M**

Financials

• Monthly net burn (accrual basis): $58,488 (+9.89% MoM)**
• Year-to-last-month net burn (cash basis): $72,170 (-4.05% MoM)**
• 2025 Transaction fees to date: $22,271
• Outstanding invoices as of today: $196,965 (+$22,850 WoW or +13.12% WoW)

** Annual run rate, monthly net burn and year-to-last month net burn metrics will be updated to July after the month-end close next week.

Development

• Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): None! 🙌

Last Week’s Highs and Lows

• Folks are taking time to take care of themselves! We’ve got a long race to run – don’t burn out! (BJ)
• Officially notified by HPD that KC3 and we have won the HPD data RFP! We still have some hearts and minds to win over there, but this makes it official – we are the provider to the nation’s largest municipal housing agency! (BJ)
• We completed the final phase of the L+M project on time. It required data improvements for building developments, development-aware address matching, custom measure costs, team scoped buildings, to create a bulk impact analysis spreadsheet of 4 different scopes on 151 buildings with deep-linking into Momentum. (FH) – which is already leading to new conversations to flex this muscle in new (and hopefully profitable) ways for other customers (BJ)
• A deadline chases another: NYSERDA approved our proposed Transition Plan, officially kicking off a 4 weeks deadline to deliver Phase 1 (access to a basic set of tables on Metabase + documentation) (FH)
• Got initial green light from CPC Climate Capital to engage us to use Momentum to help them to identify target project types in different markets across the country as part of a GGRF 2.0 play that they are pursuing (MZ)
• Ran a lot of decarb plans in Momentum which helped me better understand patterns across a wider range of buildings (MZ)
• We started trying out Clean Architecture – a topic that has been debated in one form or another for a couple of years! The ineffective/inefficient structure of the code has been a real drag, and I’m very hopeful that we’re on the road of faster, more harmonious application development! (BJ)
• First stab at automated browser testing is starting to gather steam - thanks Jeff and Randy for moving that ball down the court! Coincidentally. there are some nice tooling we can anticipate later in August from the PhpUnit / P

Any missing highlights? Please share in Slack comments.

Crow’s Nest

Looking out for icebergs: What are the risks on the horizon that we’re watching for and navigating around?

François’ List

• Growing the team: the NYCA news further raises the priority of onboarding the right talent to help us deliver quickly from data processing to front-end. We’re making progress identifying places where we need the most help, Reuben is starting to circulate possible interview focus and candidates - but are we ready to welcome new folks and help them be productive?

Jason’s List

• +1 on others’ about growing the team. We need to move faster, and I hope we can integrate more people quickly and smoothly!
• We’ve increased our feature set quite a bit lately, and it’s going to continue growing for some time. How can we scale our our testing to keep pace?

And carryovers:

• AI Document Scraping How will scraping project scopes and contractor bids, which will be more difficult, go? And how quickly can we get this figured out and incorporated into the code? This is one of the areas where we can provide some real magic for users.
• Local politics There’s still a lot that could happen between now and the general election in November. NYC DOB is worried about the optics of this first year of LL97 filing and wants to make sure it goes smoothly and offers a positive takeaway.
• NYC Accelerator news is in! 🎉 We have a lot of build for this–and I realize more with each passing day–so I’m hoping our team continues to incorporate the new tools and processes, and remains vocal and open about what they are working on and what’s not working for them.
• ConEd Recompete Still waiting for news
• Portfolio/program reporting Users want the ability to look at groups of buildings in our software, whether it’s looking in their own collections for buildings that meet certain criteria or looking at trends across projects in a program. We haven’t done anything in this vein yet, but we’ll need to start. L+M, CFHF, FirstService, and more want and expect this set of features from us. And we’re starting to learn what jobs they are looking to do with the spreadsheets we’re providing so far.

Marc’s List

• +2 on others’ about growing the team. I am especially concerned about bringing in the right mix of skills to support customer success.

Carryovers

• Execution! It is definitely go time!
• Work-Life Balance But we need to not get burned out!

Erika’s List

• Money, Money, Money What is coming in and when as well as what how we’re spending. Important for hiring and planning overall and equally important is that everyone knows what all the numbers mean. Top item for this week is to make sure everyone is 100% clear.
• +3 on growing the team and making sure we have the (people and financial- see above) capacity to bring new hires on.

On Deck for This Week

• 360’s this week: Chuck, Naina and Daniel (EP)

• Upcoming 8/6 meeting with NYSERDA will be the first one with NYSERDA, us, and all the subcontractors for the Building Data Platform project.

• I’m meeting with Willdan on next steps for the projects feature–hopefully we’ll come out of this with a schedule and plan to turn it on for users! (JB)

• I’m part of the NYC Energy Code revision committee, and my first meeting is this Thursday. (JB)

• Informal coffee with Caroline, out contact at Con Ed about how Momentum could be helpful to their program down the road (MZ)

• Business development and sales: Finalize scope of work with CPC Climate Capital for that research project and with E3 on the Con Ed Grid forecasting RFP (MZ)

• Documentation of a proposal for updated measure package logic for Momentum based on decarb plans I have been running on a bunch of buildings (MZ)

• L+M Cost Shift agreement - we all want to wrap this up this week, maybe it will bleed into early next, but moving it along (EP)

• New healthcare plan finalized and timeline out to the team (EP)

• Here’s what’s on the Company Radar

Upcoming Release

The “big 100” – with public announcement of some sort of Projects, and a bunch of team improvements. Hoepfully this week!

Please Leave Feedback

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• Did we miss a highlight? Something else you want to react to?