List, rank, iterate

Balaji Srinivasan is something of an intellectual celebrity nowadays, but what's lesser known is that he also has a brother who was a master at operational excellence. They cofounded Counsyl, which they later sold for $375 million.

I mostly write this article so I can remember the single most important operational framework shared by his brother, Ramji, for approaching unstructured problems.

He is incredibly disciplined, very, very smart, and he just approaches problems in a different way than I do. What Ramji contributed is a skill or a mode of thinking that I call “list, rank, iterate.” It’s kind of a meta-algorithm, which is almost trivial to describe but a very useful way to attack unstructured problems.

Basically, what it means is, let’s say you have a problem. “How do we increase sales?” or “How do we raise funds?” or “How do we do X?” or “How do we do Y?” Often what you can do is, you can start by making a list — for example, a list of prospective doctors to sell to or a list of prospective VCs to go and fundraise from.

Then impose a ranking function on them, which is, “Hey, which zip code is this doctor in? Are they likely to prescribe this test?” et cetera, or “Has this VC invested in companies like ours before?”

Then you just iterate brutally through this. The key thing is you put a limit. You say, “All right, I’m going to do 150 of these. If I don’t get any hits on them, then I’m going to try a new strategy, a new list.” This concept of list, rank, iterate is a great way of structuring unstructured problems. That’s something that I owe Ramji.

Source: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/balaji-srinivasan