The Other Equation: People/Team Fit
(how we almost f*cked it up on the road to product/market fit)
Good products come from great ideas. But really good products come from great teams. There are certainly examples where this wasn’t true, but those examples are exceptions, not the rule. In the case of Houseparty, our product improved when we course-corrected how our people work together — how they interact, share ideas, and collaborate to inspire one another — and, ultimately, succeed both individually and as a team.
We built Houseparty to foster meaningful relationships with the people you care about most. That starts with prioritizing the people we care about most — at Houseparty, that’s our team. Even with that underpinning, it was much easier than I thought possible to push culture to the backburner in the midst of increasing scale. And it wasn’t until we brought it back front and center that product KPIs improved too.
When Houseparty took off in the middle of 2016, we simply did not have the technical expertise to deal with scaling. We had to hire rapidly and our San Francisco hub went from being Tel Aviv’s satellite office to company headquarters. By the end of Q4 2016, we had shuttered most Tel Aviv operations, doubled the SF team, and closed our Series C. Oh and did I mention that I was pregnant? By February the team doubled, AGAIN, I was into my third trimester and about to go on maternity leave. To add insult to injury, we outgrew our space so we had to deal with relocating. I had the baby the day after we moved into our new office space. Perfect timing. I felt victorious, but it was superficial.

Organizational debt is just as crippling as technical debt
At one point in early 2017, I proudly told a friend that we had hired fifteen engineers over the past three months. His response was, “well you just blew your culture.” What else could we do? There was so much pressure to get it right while the momentum was on our side. More means more, right?
Wrong.
Hiring rapidly came with negative downstream impact. We hired talent but didn’t have the operational bandwidth to integrate the talent into the organization. I would liken it to doing a bunch of tiny acqui-hires. Each individual brought with them the baggage of their previous employer. I say “baggage” because while technical debt was crippling our product, competing cultures created organizational debt that crippled our productivity. So, we applied our product focus — making Houseparty reliable, simple, and fun — to our people operations.
Long-term impact of hiring with short-term intent
The “rock stars” we hired were just that — real rock stars. They hit the ground running and worked hard to build incredibly fast. The team was interested in solving the complex problems presented by a rapidly scaling app built on a shaky foundation. With their help, we went beyond stabilizing the app to making it thrive. And while we were small and scrappy, the fiercely independent nature of this team was helpful. But, once the app stabilized, our needs shifted and the lack of a unified culture created misalignment and eventually bred unhealthy politics.
Our first instinct was (again) to hire our way out of it. This time, we thought experienced leadership would help us. More experience is better, right?
Wrong.
The only way to deal with the politics, was to tackle it from within, not over the top. Something that is incredibly hard to do without adequate context. It also meant hard decisions that eventually led to parting ways with people we really enjoyed working with.
No one’s happy in an echo chamber
To nip the underlying political tones of our growing team, we first dealt with the power dynamic between newer employees and our original team from Meerkat — both socially and professionally.
We quickly grew past five buddies working out of an apartment office, but didn’t evolve our communication style to be inclusive of all the new voices. For example, we continued making company decisions in more personal, one-off conversations; to us it felt natural, but newer employees found it harder to break into that process. We transitioned to making company and product decisions in a more transparent and systematic manner.
Some of the most impactful changes we made:
1) Better communication tools. We chose Phabricator for project management and accountability, Lever for hiring, and Front for trust and support (to name a few). We also encouraged decision-making and discussions to happen in PUBLIC Slack channels.
2) A more democratic Team Weekly structure. Instead of presenting look-backs, we moved to project leads presenting look-forwards, which gave people the opportunity to ask questions and bring up concerns during a weekly all-hands.
3) Standardized onboarding process for all new hires. Everyone — marketing, finance, operations, engineering — get a consistent education; from a welcome walk, to functional overviews like marketing with Kimberly, QA with Kate, and data with Jeff.
4) Deliberate recruiting and hiring rubric. It was no longer enough to hire a great person, we had to hire the right great person. We began prioritizing candidates’ motivation and values alignment, not just their skill set and how it applies to our needs at the time.
It takes more than an invite to be a good host
Socializing was also a pain point. We found that newer employees were less likely to engage in team bonding. Once we realized open invites weren’t enough of an effort, we democratized social planning through a revolving host committee. This led to more variety in our activities; softball, kids’ day, game nights, and my personal favorite: PROM! We also started sending employees on “party lunch” — randomly generated groups of four have lunch together, somewhere outside the office, on our tab. Building in a monthly tradition made mingling more reliable and consistent.
I mean, we literally built Houseparty so that people didn’t have to send an invite to start socializing with friends online. We finally gave that same thought to our culture, figuring out what about the social situation made it feel heavy or uninviting. It took a more prescribed approach to socializing to create an environment for inclusion and serendipity between people and teams.
Create opportunity where it doesn’t exist
Hiring a bunch of experienced, talented people meant we had people come to work with specific ideas for career progression or lateral movement. We’re just a 45 person team. It’s like being in the awkward teenage years of scaling. We aren’t small enough to be completely flat, but we’re not big enough to support many management roles or discrete teams. Initially, we made the mistake of setting expectations poorly and making trade-offs to appease individuals that turned out not to be best for the whole. After a couple of those mistakes, we tacked back too hard in the other direction. We became too rigid, and people weren’t feeling the empowerment they wanted from a company at our stage.
I think we have finally landed in a good place. We are able to look for the grey areas that support career goals without compromising on the greater good: for an engineer looking for leadership to work on product management; for a brand manager looking for creativity to learn graphic design; for a support leader looking for a challenge to learn to code.
Just like product, the organization is always a work in progress
I wish I could take the Netflix tactic of we are “not a family.” That would make day to day decision-making much easier; more black and white. That’s just not who I am. When I leave my family to come here every day, it’s because Houseparty is family too. I care deeply about our team’s satisfaction and crafting a culture reflective of our mission. Taking time to prioritize people during the inevitable startup rollercoaster is fucking hard, but we should all do it. And if not because you care, then do it because it also has the amazing side effect of driving business goals.
We certainly don’t pretend to have all the answers. With each new chapter of growth, our playbook must evolve, and it’s more likely that we’ll make wrong decisions before we make the right ones. But at least for now I feel good that we have a strong and sustainable foundation to weather those headwinds.
Have you experienced something similar? Reply here or let me know on Twitter @simasistani.
