Toss Your Org Chart

December 24, 2011 Leave a comment

Org charts suck in a startup.  While they provide clarity around who makes decisions, they also communicate hierarchy and “I’m more important than you” during a time when most of us are wearing many hats and need to be accountable for deliverables across functions.  And if you have less than 40-50 employees, reporting relationships and “who does what” is pretty obvious to everyone on the team, so my negativity towards org charts are really for companies at or below this threshold.

At an early stage, reporting relationships are far less important than defining the handful (most definitely 5 or less) key objectives or focus areas for the company in 90-180 day increments.  Meaning, the only thing the majority of folks should be focused on is what will drive success over the next 3-6 months.  I’ve written in a previous post about the need to focus much longer term and determine strategy in order to determine what those key near-term objectives should be, but let’s assume you know them and need to get everyone focused on what to do, who’s accountable for what objective and which employees work on which objectives.  I’m a big advocate of creating a “one sheet” that lists on one side key activities and who’s responsible and metrics on the other side.

However, one of our founders came up with an awesome visualization that completely replaces the need for an org chart and provides instant clarity on 1) the key focus areas for the company, 2) who’s ultimately accountable for each area (the lead), 3) who the team members are that will work on each focus area and 4) team members that may have more than one focus area (to ensure their time is allocated properly).  This is our visual for BlackLocus with the names and key deliverables scrubbed a bit.  Everyone in the company is assigned to one of these 4 key focus areas. It’s no coincidence, however, that Jesus is accountable for Revenue!

I absolutely love this approach.  Could our priorities and who is leading and working on each priority be any clearer?  Those of you who know nothing about our company know instantly what our near term focus areas are.  Great work Rodrigo!

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Don’t Go It Alone, Get Out of Your Bubble

December 10, 2011 Leave a comment

Since I’ve moved to Austin and joined BlackLocus roughly 6 weeks ago, I’ve probably had 30+ meetings with individuals outside the company.  Why?  Because without exception I learn something from every one of these meetings that will help me be a better leader and reduce risk of failure during this critical phase of the company’s development when there are foundational decisions we are making every day.  You may be thinking, “Geez Taylor, why don’t you just put your head down and get to work instead of networking your way out of business”.  There’s clearly a balance here and I’m not suggesting that you should network for networking’s sake, but rather identify folks that have specific and relevant experience dealing with the issues most pressing right now in your business.  And by the way, it need not be successful experience, there is a ton to be learned from other people’s mistakes.  Wouldn’t you rather learn from someone else’s setback than your own?  Whether its the need to raise money, or perhaps figure out a go-to-market strategy, or even how to tackle a tough engineering problem, there are likely people in your extended network that are ahead of where you are today and have navigated, either successfully or unsuccessfully, the urgent problem you have to solve.  In either case, that perspective is valuable as input into your decision.

Now there is a consequence to seeking multiple points of view and getting so much data as input.  Ultimately you have to formulate a point of view, have conviction and make the tough decision.  And doing so with so much external data can be more difficult and confusing particularly if there are a lot of disparate viewpoints on the same issue or problem.  But that’s what leadership is!  Putting your ego aside, realizing you aren’t the master of everything, seeking external viewpoints and data, then distilling it all and having the courage to make a decision and execute against it.

Filed under Entrepreneurship, Leadership Tagged with , , , ,

Early Stage Priority Confusion

December 2, 2011 Leave a comment

During the early stages in a stressful, lonely place I call StartupLand, it can be overwhelming determining where to focus scarce resources, both people and money.  There’s endless product issues to address – customer features, performance, reliability, scalability – and if you have a Minimum Viable Product and a bit of luck there are existing customers to support and retain.  Add to the mix the need to both acquire more customers and add other strategic partners to complement your product.  Don’t forget recruiting, if you are funded and enjoy the ability to grow your team, sourcing and interviewing talent can literally take up 30-50% of everyone on the team in the early days.  Oh, and your Board and investors will require some care and feeding through reporting and monthly or quarterly meetings.  That’s a lot to juggle if you have a small team (5-15) trying to tackle each of these priorities.

So how and where do you focus scarce resources?

By being ruthless about both prioritizing and sequencing those priorities where maximum traction can be proven in the shortest period of time.  And by traction I mean proving that customers will buy your product at a price that has a path to sustainability.  In my experience, it means allocating resources in 2 primary areas in the early days:

  1. Harden the Minimum Viable Product.  Specifically, ensure the product 1) has only the most basic feature set, defined as the minimum set a customer is willing to pay for, and 2) is minimally performant, reliable and scalable meaning just sufficient in all 3 categories to retain customers and enable a six-month window of customer growth.  Probably the single biggest pitfall to avoid is allocating resources to make your product more feature rich than it has to be simply because you think your customer must have those features, all at the expense of making a more basic product work flawlessly.  Your customers probably don’t need those features yet and if you have any paying customers, then you’ve proven they don’t.
  2. Get and maintain momentum in sales/customer acquisition.  If one customer is willing to pay for your product as it exists today, then find another one willing to pay.  Then another.  There is nothing that defines traction more effectively than increasing customers and revenue.  You can be unprofitable and raise money with customer traction.  You can offset costs and hire more people with customer traction.  The world of possibilities to tweak, market and scale your business open up with customer traction.

At the end of the day, these are the only things that truly matter for an early stage startup.  Build the most basic product that you can sell, and then sell it.  And if you can sell it, then don’t build custom features, in fact don’t build any features beyond the product you can already sell until you have more resources on board.  Don’t harden the product for performance, reliability and scalability that you’ll need two years from now, harden it enough to get through the next six months of sales.

Sure, there’s lots to do from this point, but until #1 & 2 are achieved, nothing else matters, so don’t be tantalized to spend the cycles working on other high value, but optional workstreams.  Be ruthless.

Filed under Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Technology Tagged with , , ,

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