S**t Umbrella by Zach Perret

Zach Perret is the co-founder of Plaid. This essay first appeared as a blog post in April 2025.

Big companies are a shitstorm of processes, questions, meetings, requests, favors, offsites, social events, and more. Each of these requests-for-time seem innocent enough, and the individual making the request is certainly well-intentioned. But the volume of these requests can leave our teams buried in mounds of shit.

The job of a manager is to be a shit umbrella. The job of a manager-of-managers is to be a bigger shit umbrella.

And the job of an employee is to don a shit-proof jacket, and find a way to get your work done.

What do you mean by shit?

For the sake of this analogy, shit is anything that is not directly creating impact for our customers. This is not to say that things like all hands, social events, emails, etc. are unimportant – they are just less important than the hard work of creating impact for our customers.

What do we mean by “shit umbrella”?

Being a great shit umbrella means protecting your teams from all unnecessary things that sap their time. This differs by function and team. For some teams, it might mean simply giving them permission to ignore unnecessary emails and calendar invites. For others, you might need to work with the individual to convey the importance of focus (give them a better shit-proof jacket). And in more extreme cases, it might mean auditing someone’s calendar, and discussing their personal time allocation. You may even have to go upstream and get the relevant sources to reduce the amount of requests-for-time that they send to your team.

Why?

Success in a startup is entirely dependent on building products that customers want, and delivering those products to customers effectively. No startup ever wins because their team is the best at attending internal meetings or approving expense reports.

If you’d like an essay like this sent directly to your inbox every Sunday, subscribe to the free newsletter.

If you’re a founder and would like to contribute an Op-Ed to this publication, please email [email protected].