Fighting “tribal knowledge” and scaling the org side of a Series B startup
This post is operations focused and touches on some non-product/engineering challenges to scaling a startup. This post was written by Jake Simms, and was originally published on Timehop’s Blog.
When you are small, everything is easier. Everyone works at the same table. Everyone fits in the conference room. Everyone knows the detailed history of the product and the jokes. Everyone is on the same project working the same long hours for the same reason.
During that primordial ooze phase of pre-product/market-fit startup, a culture is born, communication styles are established, behavioral expectations are made.
That same feel is incredibly difficult to maintain as new people join. All that “tribal knowledge” locked up in the heads of the existing employees needs to be extracted and shared to the newer members of the team.
In the last year, Timehop has grown from 7 to 18 employees so we’ve experienced these growing pains first hand. Here are some things we’ve done to help tribal knowledge become company knowledge, and ensure that culture and core values scale with headcount.
Write things down. Put them in one spot.
Sounds obvious, but it doesn’t get done unless it’s prioritized. Our internal wiki homepage is a one stop shop outlining the tools we use (Slack, Dropbox, etc), how we use them (don’t @everyone in Slack unless it is urgent), who to talk to about what (Office manager for equipment, Head of Talent for HR concerns), inside jokes (why are there always half eaten mozzarella sticks in the fridge?), product history (how a random feature experiment turned into 10x growth), perks, benefits, organization structure, quarterly goals, team structures, etc.
It’s a lot of effort, but it keeps everyone on the same page, and helps new employees get up and running fast.
Make onboarding someone’s responsibility.
It can be easy to overlook the experience of a new employee when you’re adding multiple people a month, sometimes multiple people in a week. Someone needs to be the point person for this process. Currently, that’s our office managerYanique.
One week before starting, employees are asked for t-shirt size, favorite snacks, favorite drinks, equipment needs, etc. Those items are waiting at their desk on their first day along with a few goodies like a card signed by the team.
On their first day, they are introduced to the wiki and the documents mentioned. In their first week, we schedule a small social event to welcome them, typically team drinks.
Over the next two weeks, they meet with everyone in the company for 30 minutes. This puts a names to a face and helps build relationships quickly. This may not scale forever, but you should do it as long as you can.
Establish decision making frameworks.
Like all startups, we want a high alignment and high autonomy culture, so we use OKRs and Core Values to empower employees to decide which ideas are worth pursuing and which aren’t.
OKRs (Objectives-Key Results) state the company’s current initiatives. This helps keep teams focused on what they need to accomplish this quarter. OKRs let anyone hold up a task and evaluate whether it’s the right thing to be working on — whether it helps achieve the objectives.
Similarly, Core Values help frame decisions and allow anyone to say “philosophically, this is why I think this is right or wrong.” Core Values are the core beliefs that govern how a company operates. They state why the company exists and what is important to the people in the company. If you examine past people, process, and product decisions you will see patterns in the reasons why certain decisions were made — those are the Core Values. Write them down.
Tess and Benny led the charge in establishing our Core Values, and Tess will be writing another post on those in the future.
That’s a bit of what we’ve learned over the last year about the work behind the work. As we grow, we’ll continue to evolve these practices, stay tuned!
You’re still here? You like the idea of helping us build the future of the past? We’re hiring.
