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When assigning responsibilities to employees in a startup, you could start by treating it as a simple optimization problem to efficiently match talents with tasks. But even if you could somehow get this perfectly right, any given solution would quickly break down. Partly that\u2019s because startups have to move fast, so individual roles can\u2019t remain static for long. But it\u2019s also because job assignments aren\u2019t just about the relationships between workers and tasks; they\u2019re also about relationships between employees. The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee\u2019s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n