Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better — to go from 0 to 1.
“Zero to One” is one of a few books that changed my mindset. However, I’d like to talk more about our shifting period from Zero to One. I will come back to this book in another writing in another time.
Everything starts from an idea
What we are trying to push to the front came from a simple question more than 3 years ago.
How to adapt a global business model to a local yet very fragile and young local market?
The answer came one day fortunately and along the way the whole new set of features were established around this concept to make the bootstrap even more powerful. Fast forward to the present, within weeks of turning something from Zero to One, it’s a good thing that we have gone too fast (and too furious because of the risk of going into an unmanageable state in the near future).
While a good thing must start with a good Vision, Success is all about Execution.
By Execution, I mean everything that happens in a startup environment on daily basis. Let’s explore a typical example of a startup from its formation to its crisis state. With a compelling Vision, a group of 5–6 people gathers together with a dream that one day they would make it come true. They work relentlessly to push everything toward that Vision. There are several hats that they have to share on daily basis. The sheer amount of work is turning huge easily throughout the Product building course due to the lack of time for careful analysis at the beginning of the journey. With the ever-growing scope, the team has to expand bigger and bigger quickly. The complexity within teams becomes out of control too easily. And the whole team falls into a crisis mode when there are so many things to do but few know exactly what to do. Sound familiar?!
According to a report by CBInsights, 23% of startups fail to become viable because they believe they don’t have the “right team”.
Source: https://masschallenge.org/article/important-startup-roles
“Not the Right Team” here could mean many things but from my observations, it would be mainly on the management level rather on the individual level. Hiring skilled people is not enough. To build the startup right, you have to do these at the same time
Hire the right people for the right roles and keep it running with the right culture.
Roles are the first thing that the startup should define and continuously refine as it grows bigger and bigger over time. Culture is also a very important topic but let’s focus on the roles for now. Below are all the most essential roles at the highest level that every startup must has regardless of its stage and scale.
- Visionary is often referred to as the leader of the pack, the decision-maker. Their talent lies in dreaming big and being passionate about what the company could achieve in the future.
- Innovators help to fine-tune strategy, tactics, and business goals, invent the product before the company progresses out of its early-stages.
- Directors live and breathe the product a startup is creating. They’re in charge of directing how the product will be analyzed, built for, and positioned to buyers.
- Builders are all about being curious with code, and a willingness to push boundaries to create a killer product. They have to understand and build things with their exceptional skills toward that vision by overcoming technical challenges, by working harmoniously on set targets and goals.
- Organizers are in charge of boosting team productivity to ensure a product idea becomes a reality as quickly as possible. They make sure everyone is doing what they should be doing, and hold the startup together. They need to be flexible every day to problem solve while keeping their team on track.
- Marketers are responsible for marketing and driving demand and growth of a company’s product, for creating and building the startup’s customer base, bringing in revenue, and most importantly, making the company profitable.
- Money Managers manage all the finances and are responsible for the company’s growth, forming new relationships with companies, and creating financial processes and reporting requirements that can be used when the company scales.
- Rainmakers (aka Sales) need to convince prospects to take a gamble on an untested product, an unknown company… and hope it pays off. They need to be focused on closing as many deals as possible and do whatever it takes to make it happen, so the company has a chance at surviving.
- Customer Champions are responsible for making sure customers understand the value of their product, as well as making sure they have an unforgettable experience with the company’s product. Beyond making customers happy, they will also build out internal processes and workflows to speed up customer support to make their job easier.
How many hats do you think you’re wearing now? Technically, each of us usually excels in one or two roles but also does other roles as well in different contextes. My roles equation might look like this:
Majority(Visionary, Innovator, Marketer) + Medium(Director, Organizer) + less(Others)
Listing out all the essential roles have 2 main benefits. First, it helps everyone see the big picture, knows about your role expectation as well as what your peers are doing and expecting of you, aware of the connections and relationships between roles. This will remove unnecessary frictions in the teams’ engine. Second, it helps one to see the best role that fits their interests and capabilities the most so that one can prepare for the upgrade or the transition in one’s career path.
As you can see, if each role has around 5–6 key activities daily, there would be more than 50 key activities going on every day in a startup. At the very early stage, maybe these activities can be achieved harmoniously within a dozen team members. But as mentioned above, at the launching and subsequent stages, how to effectively scale and harmonize these activities with hundreds of team members (I hope that we can reach that good problem soon)?
Introducing “Spotify Model”
Spotify has a good model with Squad, Tribe, Chapter, Guild (Trio and Alliance but I don’t want to go into these now) for solving the complexity of matching who do what in a growing startup environment.
- Squads consist of 6–12 people each dedicated to work on one feature area. A squad is autonomous, self-organizing, and self-managing.
- Chapters consist of all the specialists in a domain such as Product, Development, QA…
- Tribes are logical groups of Squads that specialized in broader domains such as Web, Mobile or related features areas such as Trading, Payment, Loyalty …
- Guilds (or Clubs) are informal groups constituted of people who have a common interest (PS5?, Push-up, Runner, Gongcha?…)
The Squad unit is the main building block in the Spotify model. Its mission is to make sure the features are produced early and often with high quality and less rework (or simply high productivity). Chapter, Tribe, and Guild are mainly for supporting the Squad to achieve that high productivity by focusing on creating a suitable environment that can support personal growth and specific challenges to make work more engaging.
But beware of the trap of blindly applying the organizational structure and processes from the Spotify Model and hopes it works. As in any other framework, the core values that drive everything are more of the product of a unique culture. In Spotify Model, the autonomous squad is the main core value.
An autonomous unit is the heart of a high productivity organization.
To imbue this value in an organization requires tremendous efforts (both mental and physical). For any parents, making sure their kids can be “autonomous” (or independent) when they are grown-up requires many years of constant effort, patience, and energy. The same applies to the organization (or teams) building program. Essentially this is the Culture that people often talk about. But first thing first, Awareness is the beginning of anything. How to become what we want will be the next series of writings.
Key takeaways:
- Understand how complex we are and soon to be and try to picture you in that
- Be inspired to be on the journey of building an “autonomous” organization together
