There is a certain breed of people who are what I call “ultra-reliable.” They have an innate knack for getting things done, and when you assign them something, you can sleep well knowing that it’ll be complete on-time and with the utmost quality. As I sat in a meeting last week with Mike Irvine, COO of PXT Payments, I was reminded of how valuable these people are to work with.
“We’ll need the app done by August 15th to meet the outlined deadlines, and development must start now” declared Mike as we reviewed the detailed schedule of an exciting update to PXT’s mobile payment app. Mike was organizing a team of developers and was sharing a meticulously designed Gannt chart as he discussed how each department needed to provide deliverables for the complex development process.
When you’re running a real business, there is an immense amount of intertwined moving parts that depend on each other. Development needs input from finance and marketing. Project Management has to talk to sales and vice versa. Things start to get very complex, very quickly. The technology world demands people who can handle engaging with a multitude of stakeholders of different disciplines, and coordinating between those people is challenging.
As Mike explained his timeline and how he was rallying the team, it become clear that he is a member of that rare group of people who get it done. As a COO, he needs to be communicating with everyone in the business and constantly stepping into every department, even when it isn’t his expertise, to ensure deliverables are completed the right way. I see the exact same thing on a smaller level as COO of my start-up company. Mike and I are pulled in every direction to assist members of our teams and are relied on to deliver every time.
There are a few other people I know that I can always rely on to get things done. Matt Bilotti is one of them. So is Cory Bolotsky. These folks are the ones that are destined for senior leadership positions like Mike has… because at the end of the day large teams can rely on them to make it happen under pressure.