As LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman says, the company’s evolution goes through several stages of scaling from “family” to “nation”:
- Household (<10 employees) – You determine the market and suitability of the product or service
- Tribe (tens of employees) – You increase your market share, attract more funding and think about how to beat the competition.
- Village (hundreds of employees) – You plan for long-term growth and global expansion
- Nation (thousands of employees)
The size and quality of your team is one of the decisive factors in whether it is possible for your business to go from startup to scale-up and not to fail.
The main points of team management when you scale a startup
When there are five or ten of you, usually everyone does everything. It is possible to do without a clear hierarchy and documentation of tasks, improvise and have blurred approval procedures. When a company grows to 30, 50 or 100 employees, the old management model no longer makes sense.
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Revising the organizational approaches
A scale-up requires more precise management than a startup. Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all recipe for scaling. But in any case, it is unlikely to establish the team’s work in new conditions, trying to squeeze it into outdated frameworks.
Organizational changes can be painful, but they are absolutely necessary during the scaling phase, according to Sarah Tavel, formerly product lead at Pinterest. The case of a company that went through the scaling process many years ago and now has 445 million users and growing revenues is very telling. It shows that one of the root causes of all execution problems is poor organizational structure.
Initially, they had a matrixed approach, Sarah Tavel says. Teams didn’t have all the resources they needed to build a product, and quick implementation of ideas became impossible. So the solution that made everything work was to create full stack teams. Another lesson was the redundancy of internal coordination when the growth team had to report to the marketing dep. The solution was to move the growth team to report to the product, which reduced unnecessary meetings and approvals, saving time and resources.
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Automatization and ordering
As ballast is dropped from a balloon in order to gain altitude, and a company on the way to scaling should get rid of everything that complicates or slows down its work.
The easiest steps are choosing the one suitable tool for organizing work instead of numbers of different messengers and apps, and developing clear algorithms for setting and performing tasks. This significantly reduces the load and frees up resources for productivity.
But ideally, it is necessary to implement IT solutions to automate all possible processes – from payroll to specific production needs. Whatever the algorithm can provide, let it do. Whatever a machine can’t do, entrust it to the right talents.