How I've Run Major Projects
Ben Kuhn's framework for project management at scale, distilled into six principles: focus (6+ hours/day of dedicated attention), detailed planning for victory (concrete step-by-step plans that reveal timing risks), fast OODA loops (projects are information-constrained, not execution-constrained), overcommunication (repeat more than feels natural), break off subprojects (delegate PM itself beyond ~10 people), and have fun. Comes with a practical "DRI starter kit" of lightweight processes.
Key Quotes
"Knowing how well or badly things are going is important because it tells me when to start asking for more support, cutting scope, escalating problems."
"Direction is more important than magnitude."
Key Themes
The "information-constrained, not execution-constrained" insight is the most important sentence. It reframes PM overhead (meetings, Slack, updates) from waste to primary work. If the bottleneck is knowing what's going on and making good decisions based on that, then the information-processing work is the project management, not a tax on it.
The DRI starter kit is refreshingly lightweight: one 30-minute weekly meeting, one master doc, one Slack channel, one weekly update. Compare with heavyweight frameworks that require dedicated tooling and full-time PM staff.
Critical Analysis
This is excellent practical advice, clearly learned through experience rather than theory. The emphasis on overcommunication and ambient awareness enables the distributed decision-making that 14 More lessons from 14 years at Google advocates ("clear authority, distributed context, psychological safety").
The weakness is that this framework assumes a competent, trusted DRI with organizational clout. The starter kit is simple to describe but requires significant political capital to implement -- the weekly broadcast, the dedicated Slack channel, the authority to break off subprojects. In organizations where project leads lack that capital, the framework breaks down before it starts.
The "have fun" principle is genuinely important and systematically underrated. Ambitious collaborative work is inherently energizing when the team believes in the goal and trusts each other. When it stops being fun, that's a signal something structural is wrong.
Sources: How I've Run Major Projects Last updated: 2026-05-14