Growing Up: What Do You Do When Your Startup Begins to Need Structure?
A growing team is an incredible adventure. In the blink of an eye, your company goes from having a team of two, to four, to eight —sometimes it seems exponential. While that growth is exciting, it can come with some unexpected challenges for those who’ve never faced it before.
There comes a point where it seems like no one knows what others on the team are doing. There’s a lack of visibility — no way to feel accountable for each other. Everyone on your team seems to know the issues within the organization, but there is no cohesive way to move forward towards fixing them. Hours are sunk into meetings that go in circles, usually ending with scheduling follow-up meetings and not much to show in the way of progress.
Usually, these problems are an indicator that your organization is showing its first signs of needing structure. Many startup founders shudder at the idea of structure, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s freeing—it enables you to stay in the driver’s seat of your organization, and it ensures that everyone is aligned towards the organization’s success.
Every startup CEO needs a toolkit of various frameworks they can implement when problems come up. Let’s discuss your first layer of structure: OKRs and 15Five’s.
Objectives and Key Results
John Doerr, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, realized that Google needed basic structure when it was less than a year old in 1999. He pitched Larry and Sergey on implementing OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results. The system had come from Intel and was developed by Andy Grove, one of Intel’s co-founders.
Think of an OKR as a quarterly, business-oriented SMART goal. OKRs are transparent to your entire organization, and everyone from the CEO to junior level employees can see what their colleagues are focusing on.
Your objective needs to be a bit ambitious and make you feel uncomfortable — but only slightly. A stretch goal. Your key results need to be clear, measurable (preferably quantifiable), and objective. You want to say “increase traffic by 20%” instead of saying “drive more visitors to our website”.
An example OKR is as follows:
Objective: Build Out Sustainable Growth Levers
- Develop at least two scalable paid lead generation strategies
- Choose top three highest converting sets of copy across paid channels
- Develop at least 4 relevant custom audiences reaching at least 2 million people across the US
OKRs are measured twice: mid-quarter and at the end of a quarter. OKRs are looked at mid-quarter to set guidance and expectations. Everyone looks at their performance at the end of the quarter to see how well their work was aligned with their OKRs.
Success is measured by the number of key results that were accomplished — your goal should be that you are accomplishing 60–70% of them. Accomplishing less than 60% of your key results means you need to take a hard look at the fundamentals that are standing in your way. Accomplishing more than 70% of your key results usually means you’re aiming too low, and you can be achieving significantly more as you work.
15Five
15Five is a powerful weekly check-in tool that enables you to easily survey your employees and feel a pulse for how your organization is doing. Your employees take fifteen minutes every week to answer key questions, and you take five minutes every week to review them. This review ensures that your employees are taking at least fifteen minutes per week to critically review their own progress.
Everybody is different, and every organization will benefit from different questions. Brad Hargreaves (founder & CEO at Common; co-founder at General Assembly) was nice enough to allow me to post the five questions we currently use at Common. They’re simple, straightforward, and help us flesh out potential problems within our organization.
1. What did you accomplish last week?
2. What do you plan to accomplish this week?
Simple goal setting. How much of what you set out to do gets done?
3. Where do you need strategic thought partnership?
How can you best use your time to help your direct reports work through problems?
4. What are your top three resource bottlenecks?
Where should you be focusing your hiring efforts? Is the bottleneck in lack of resources, or are your processes inefficient? A tool to tease out potential issues in the organization before they become serious problems.
5. What’s keeping you up at night?
Give your direct reports a forum to discuss key issues that are on their minds. Let them air their grievances — they’re much better aired this way and not left to stew into anger or contempt. What are their biggest concerns? Address them before they become your biggest concerns.
Brad glances at questions one and two to have a better idea of what’s getting done. Then, he focuses on questions three, four, and five to provide the most value in his weekly meetings with direct reports.
Putting It All Together
OKRs help set aggressive, high-level organizational goals that track progress quarter-by-quarter. 15Five’s offer weekly guidance on what’s getting done, and what’s standing in the way of things getting done.
OKRs are helpful to everyone to have in your organization, and you should aim for everyone to have four to six OKRs per quarter. This ranges from you, to your team leads, to their direct reports. Work with your direct reports to craft their OKRs, and have them subsequently work with their direct reports in a similar manner.
OKRs hinge on transparency, and the easiest way to accomplish that is a Google Doc file in an organization-wide shared folder. Host a team meeting to run through your OKRs, and have your direct reports announce theirs. Then, host a meeting halfway through the quarter to update your team on the company’s progress. Key results that are on track to being completed should be marked green, ones at risk yellow, and ones that are on track to be missed should be marked red. Host a similar meeting at the end of the quarter to review your final results.
With the high level on track, use your 15Five check-in meetings to provide as much value to your direct reports as possible. They’re relying on you to push the ball forward, and the success of your entire organization hinges on their ability to make progress. Ensure that your one-on-one meetings are productive by reviewing 15Five’s beforehand, preparing yourself with relevant context.
OKRs and 15Five’s help us implement light structure in an organization. This light structure sheds a tremendous amount of visibility into the organization, its bottlenecks, and its path going forward.
You now have two additional very powerful frameworks to move your organization forward. What are your next steps?
The content in this post is heavily based on how structure works at Common, where I joined after it acquired Skylight. A huge thank you to Elmir Kouliev for the inspiration to write this post, and a huge thank you to Brad Hargreaves for exposing me to the principles outlined above.
