Building ADHD-Friendly SOPs for Scalable Growth, With Skye Waterson

Points of Interest

• 00:01 – Introduction: Marcel introduces Skye Waterson and frames the conversation around SOPs, documentation, and building operational “rails” that teams can actually use.
• 01:07 – Skye’s background and motivation: Skye shares her journey from academic burnout to discovering adult ADHD and building a business focused on helping founders work with their brains, not against them.
• 03:04 – Why ADHD frameworks help everyone: Skye explains how ADHD-friendly systems emphasize flexibility and challenge outdated assumptions about productivity and work structure.
• 05:05 – First principles for ADHD productivity: The discussion covers practical strategies like rewarding task initiation and reducing reliance on working memory through better capture systems.
• 06:56 – The core problem with traditional SOPs: Skye and Marcel outline why most SOPs go stale—delegated, filed away, and only referenced during onboarding or emergencies.
• 09:18 – SOP neglect as a hidden operational risk: The conversation highlights how disconnected SOPs undermine dashboards, metrics, and leadership visibility.
• 11:32 – Visualizing the business as a flow: Skye introduces her core framework: mapping the business end-to-end (acquisition through expansion) using a visual tool like Miro.
• 14:02 – Why digital visual tools matter: Skye explains why paper-based process mapping fails and why digital tools enable iteration, ownership, and follow-through.
• 15:52 – Assigning a single DRI per process: Each node in the business flow is assigned a Directly Responsible Individual to eliminate ambiguity and improve accountability.
• 16:40 – Red, orange, green process health: Processes are color-coded to show whether they are broken, manual and CEO-dependent, or documented and team-run.
• 18:09 – Tying SOPs to weekly cadence and metrics: Skye explains how reviewing SOP health alongside performance metrics turns documentation into an operational diagnostic tool.
• 24:41 – AI and living SOPs: The episode closes with best practices for using AI to bootstrap SOPs, delegate ownership, and treat documentation as a living draft rather than a finished artifact.

Show Notes

• Connect with Skye via LinkedIn
• Unconventional Organization
• Skye’s Podcast ADHD Skills Lab
• AI Chatbot: Message Skye on Instagram with the word “Marcel” and she’ll send you the chatbot
• Software as a Science Book
• Matt Verlaque

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