The 70/30 Cover Fire Allocation
Spend 70% earning the right to exist so the other 30% can plant seeds nobody will kill.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 92%
Emergent, high-upside work is illegible to a large organization and gets killed on sight. Komoroske's answer is to deliberately split team effort: 70% on unambiguously valuable, boring, legible work that makes it socially unacceptable for anyone to ask 'what does that team even do?' — and 30% on seeds. The legible 70% is cover fire; the 30% is where the outsized impact actually comes from.
Origin
Komoroske's operating model as a director at Google, adopted after he decided he never wanted to be promoted inside a large organization again — which freed him from having to make his highest-impact work legible.
Core principles
- 01Credibility is the currency that buys protection for illegible work.
- 02The question 'what does that team do anyway?' is a death sentence — never let it be askable.
- 03Boring linear value is not wasted; it is the shield.
- 04The 30% must not be forced or steered toward outcomes, or it stops being emergent.
- 05Great work requires a high-trust environment where people lean into superpowers — there is no shortcut.
How to run it
- 1
Identify the unambiguously valuable 70%
Pick work that any peer in the company would agree creates real value — even boring, linear value. The bar is not 'best team in the world', it is 'clearly they are doing something useful and of course they should exist'.
Pro tip Test it by imagining a skeptical exec looking at your roadmap: would they nod, or would they raise an eyebrow?
Watch out Do not fake the 70%. If the legible work is weak, the cover collapses and the 30% dies with it.
- 2
Execute it visibly and reliably
Hit goals, move metrics, execute well. The purpose is to minimize the chance anyone thinks it is appropriate to question the team's existence.
Pro tip Visible, dependable delivery buys silence — silence is the space the seeds need.
- 3
Release the 30% to individual conviction
Let people spend the remaining slack on things they are personally excited about — including ideas you privately think are odd. Name your concerns, point at the part you find genuinely compelling, then get out of the way.
Pro tip Frame it as 'go for it, here are my concerns, this bit right here is really cool' rather than approval or veto.
Watch out If you steer the 30% toward a target outcome, you have converted it into a build and lost the emergence.
- 4
Guard the acorns from squirrels
Actively defend early sprouts from being dug up: resource raids, premature reviews, demands for metrics. Your organizational credibility from the 70% is the instrument you spend here.
Pro tip Absorb the legibility demands yourself so the team never feels them.
Watch out Every new idea is an 'ugly baby' (Ed Catmull, Creativity Inc.) — expect the organization's instinct to be revulsion, not curiosity.
In the wild
On being promoted to director, he decided he never wanted another promotion inside a large org. That removed the need to make his work measurable in a way that showcased individual heroic effort — so he could pursue the highest-impact work even when it was illegible, using the team's clearly-valuable output as cover.
→ He describes this as the single biggest unlock of his career, roughly 10x-ing his impact for the organization.
Lenny's restatement of the pattern: the team publicly hits goals and moves metrics, generating cover fire, while inside that protected space you quietly build the thing that could change everything — where no one will come and stop it.
→ The team stays unimpeachable in review cycles while retaining the freedom to do genuinely novel work.
Common mistakes
Going 100% legible
A team that only does defensible, measurable work will never produce anything great. Good work has a million paths; great work only comes from a high-trust environment where people lean into their superpowers — and that is never legible up the chain.
Going 100% illegible
Without the 70% cover, someone will eventually ask what the team does, and that question alone puts the team on the verge of death. The seeds get dug up before they sprout.
Managing the 30% like a portfolio
Applying reviews, OKRs and prediction to the seed work kills the very dynamic — emergence — that gives the 30% its asymmetric payoff.
Is it for you?
Best for
Directors, group PMs and team leads inside large organizations who want to do genuinely novel work without becoming a target in the planning cycle.
Not ideal for
Early-stage startups where nobody is auditing your legitimacy and 100% of effort should chase the single bet.
From the transcript
“my Approach at Google was 70% of my effort and my team's effort should go on things that everybody acknowledges are important and useful and…”
“if someone says about your team your team is on the verge of death so you're trying to minimize the chance that anybody wants to…”
“but now once you do this you have like 30% of your extra time that you can plant all these seeds”
“if you want to get your team to do great”
“one of the hardest parts about an acorn”
From the episode
Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice
Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google)