Go to the profile of Marcio dos Santos Galli
Marcio dos Santos Galli

Outliers at work

Nurturing the startup’s dream team

Your are not in search for talents, or skills. Instead, you are in a mission to inspire contributors to join your journey. Employees join companies because of many factors beyond skills — they join because of the mission, values, causes, technical challenges, culture behaviour, work environment, and a lot more.

It’s a blue ocean, of strong waters in amidst the weather that is not always sunny, but yet an adventure for its team.

The quest is not about convincing them but triggering a network of people (contributors, partners, users, investors, media, and more) that will identify/match/love with what you have to offer — if you have. This is not far from what happens at the stage when a startup is after its MVP: a need to identify its user tribes of lead users. If you have designed a path that unbundles opportunities, within a market, then you must nurture a system that identifies and maintains your platform-tribe: the early passionated team players that will inspire other contributors to join the movement.

Derek’s Sivers pause for lead movers

Safety network for reaching out to dreams

Every adventure comes with a level of risk as disruptive ideas may live amidst forces of existing markets. In the wild ocean, of red and blue waters, your team may find additional value if the boat offers a few safety nets. That is a reason for building the team’s social and value network; that should enable team players to have comfort to move their the company roadmap and ideas ahead — to achieve new realities if there are no showstoppers ahead. An initial safety platform strategy may focus in principles/values:

  • Clean mission and values;
  • High standards of transparency;
  • Culture of collaboration;
  • Acceptance for failure.

But to ensure a nice road, towards the scalable future, the challenge is to have a roadmap that accepts roadmap’s potential changes, along the journey. And also to have the team to understand a roadmap’s lifecycle.

  • Initial design — the need to have a clear roadmap that represents an initial proposition;
  • Implementation phase — an understanding that focus in efficiency should not kill creative output that may get generated amidst issues or exciting ideas that our teams can stumble along the way;
  • Roadmap recycling — the effort in which a team is aware and participates in the roadmap analysis facing goals and challenges. But beyond that, the need to consider not only the evaluation of planned deliverables but also to account creative data and potential for disruption.

Such roadmap accounting cycle needs to take in consideration the long term vision versus reality within the market-in-development (or the market layers that may come your way.) The team needs to be aware on potential risks that premature scaling can bring, and be aware that experimentation is also part of the process. Therefore, that premature development may happen and that the team may be subject, and fully responsible, for potential new priorities.

Pascal’s relaxing pause

Working with talents

Okay, you never searched really for talents; but they joined you. But before working with talents, I would like to mix in (the talented!) Elizabeth Gilbert to remind ourselves that a genius can live through our team — and that talent is state of discoverability.

“And it’s the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius, rather than having a genius. “ Elizabeth Gilbert, Your elusive creative genious.

Therefore, if talent (alongside with creativity) is also a stage of life, or an opportunity, then we need to nurture the biased culture that keeps and sparks talent; even within the ones that were not yet there. It’s about nurturing our creative minds with sustainable and collaborative factors:

  • Your solid platform starts with not taking for granted that you are working with passionated minds. You teams are stakeholders that are also responsible for promoting that good bias;
  • A team player contribution produces two outcomes: a creative contribution and a delivery contribution. This is the recognition that a team member will do “in the box” and “outside the box” activities.

Performance arises out of collaboration and teamwork advancements which is indeed subject to processes, champions and other variables. Steve Blank uses a great analogy that helps us to avoid the misconception that entrepreneurship is a phase and that a scaling team is another disconnected phase. If we disconnect things, we are to find ourselves amidst the scaling nightmare that experienced executives and talented employees understands well — every team member is always ready to jump out of the boat because, in the end of the day, a passionated talent may well find another great place to collaborate.

Pause to listen to Steve’s team orchestra (1 min)

“For me, not understanding that you are putting together an orchestra, rather than playing a single instrument, and again to use the musical analogy, is where a lot of young entrepreneurs get it wrong” Steve Blank @ Entrepreneurship is a Team Effort

Error friendly and creativity

Innovation moves side by side with error and curiosity. If u have a great team, then they probably display high standards to engage creative productivity. Here are a few components that I see as contributing factors that can turn sudden unplanned roadblocks into motives for innovation discovery.

  • Tolerance and learning — tolerance for errors, tolerance for ambiguity and a learning oriented mindset. These are elements are commonly found in entrepreneurs, and perhaps a good toxicity that should spread within our teams. If we understand how great disruption borns, and that user innovation comes out of real problems, then you are not nurturing an ecosystem for producing errors. Instead, we are nurturing acceptance that we learn along the way.
  • Sense of curiosity — we need to beware and to take a strategic reaction when we confront with major problems, such as mistakes, errors, bad decisions, and so on; which is subject to happen in any individual or groups. The real danger is to create an early classification that could prevent our creative minds. Too strict reactions are very dangerous because it leads us to not see things from other angles. It’s also important to beware our out-of-the-box risk management processes, which could prevent a company to see amazing solutions if a problem is “taken care”. In the end of the day, we want problems to be understood from multidisciplinary views; and with a touch of creativity to look at them.

Pause for Steve Blank’s curiosity

Final words

“I am not yet working in a company that is scaling but this work is here as it helps me to digest/understand what is going on — based in the resources I have learned — and also it could become an opportunity so I can foresee that next games are to happen when things scale. “ Marcio

On the stage

I have borrowed the following slide from Bliztscaling01 video. John states that these are the things we care about at the early stage named OS1:

  1. product
  2. Product-market fit
  3. role of founders
  4. hiring & company/culture values
  5. staying solvent/financed (marcio’s note: alive and preparing to grow)

Bending realities amidst later-now

I also found interesting to see highlighted note from LinkedIn folks which stated the balance between performance and adaptability — which goes on for a Blitzscaling company. In a sense, things correlates with the early process, however named creativity and delivery but nevertheless presented as a balanced effort. While the smaller is shaping the product and reshaping a roadmap that supports changes along the scaling pathways.