Delegation

Delegation is handing off ownership of a task or an outcome to someone, or something, else, so it gets done well without you doing it. Real delegation transfers not just the activity but the responsibility: the other party owns the result, decides the reversible details, and comes back to you only for the genuinely irreversible calls.

For a founder, it's the only way to escape being the bottleneck on everything. The failure mode is delegating the task but not the trust, hovering, re-checking, taking it back the moment it's done differently than you'd have done it, which costs more than doing it yourself and teaches the other party nothing. Good delegation needs three things up front: a clear definition of done, the authority and access to get there, and a way to verify the outcome rather than micromanage the steps.

In practice that means writing the task down so someone else can own it. Say you're onboarding a new support hire and you build the refund process once in Process Street as a checklist, with the decision rules baked in, so they run it without asking you. Or say you hand a backlog item to a contractor in Linear: the ticket carries the spec, the definition of done, and the acceptance check, so you review the result, not every step. The same applies to machines, say you're tired of copy-pasting new signups into your CRM and your email tool, so you build the flow once in n8n and never touch it again. Founders who delegate well buy back the one thing they can't make more of, their own time.