The Start-up Loop
What’s great about a start-up? It’s lean. It’s agile. It’s ambitious. It can pivot. All great stuff, but more than anything it has an extremely short feedback loop across most of its functional aspect. Or to put it another way, the shortest distance between action and measurable reaction.
Typically when someone says “start-up” and “feedback” in the same sentence they mean shipping a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) in super quick time to check product-market-fit. This is not what I mean, well… it is, but not in its entirety. Iterating your product is clearly important to ensure that you are servicing your most valuable, or indeed, just any existing customer, or starting to get traction with your intended customers.
The other part of the feedback loop is how your team operates, the information which is passed between team members, the dynamics and the dynamism of participation. How do you make choices about the feedback you’ve received, who implements it, decides on the course of action and then markets the result?
When there’s three or four of you in the business, you have to be a generalist, which also means you have a good grasp of other parts of the business and the roles of people within it. Your inter-personal and inter-skill feedback loops are also super tight; you could have an idea, the designer could create it and the developer could implement it and then you could market it. The communication, the grey bits in-between idea and implementation, they’re all filled in by your shared understanding of the objective of the product, business or mission statement.
This part of the process of creating a new business is exciting, invigorating and unless you’re very lucky nerve racking. It’s where rubber is meeting the road with such vigour clouds of smoke are billowing from the acceleration!
I’m calling this phase of your business the Tight Loop phase.
As things start to grow, and you hit 10–15 people you’re entering the Slow Tight Loop phase. The STL phase of your business should still be highly tuned, there’s not too many of you, so communication is still fairly organic, you’re mostly still wearing a few different hats. It’s the Slow Tight Loop because the dynamics are almost identical to the Tight Loop, except you’re all getting busier. There’s no “management” layer yet, you’re all largely sitting with your face glued to the coal face, however there’s a need for management to help to orchestrate accounts, customer service, inbound leads, chasing suppliers, etc, etc. You’re putting 120% into the business rather than just 110%. The implicit understanding is still there, shared between you all, but you can’t move collectively as quickly due to the drag of day-to-day business.
The Slow Tight Loop is probably one of the most difficult parts of growing your business. The demands on your time, as a whole team, are huge and there’s no clear prioritisation because, at this point, everything is important. Should you concentrate on the finding the new hire or chase some product feedback or analyse your budget to make sure the new hire can be supported on the current income / growth? All this stuff will come down to good time management / prioritisation and general smarts (not a topic for this article). The point here is you still all have good context and are able to react quickly, just not as quickly as in the Tight Loop Phase.
Okay, so you’ve burned yourself to a cinder in the Slow Tight Loop phase and managed to grow your team out to 23 or so people. Things are getting easier for you, more specialisation is present in the business, and the generalists are still there but are the exception, rather the rule. They’re the ones with the context who’ve been there since the initial inception. Some middle management or let’s call it operational support (as middle management feels a bit 1980’s, equipped with shoulder pads!) has been introduced. It’s now someone’s full time job to make sure cash is in the bank and is also being collected from those elusive, but now existing customers.
So what loop are we in now? We’re in the Loop Loop phase. We’re still tight, everyone knows everyone, but there’s now “divisions” or “departments”, no hang on, let’s call them teams. Each team has super awesome context and understands what they’re doing, the feedback loops are relatively quick inside the team, but they’re also meshing with the other team’s feedback. Product marketing has done the easy stuff and is onto more complex product definition. They’re inputting into development and design and finance. They’re looking at changes to the UI, addition of features, new ways to articulate the proposition externally. It’s no longer one feedback loop. There’s strategic and tactical feedback loops. It’s a bit slower, but there’s still a good holistic understanding and context.
The Loop Loop is a great time for the business, the pressures off, a bit, in terms of those crazy hours (you’re still grafting hard, but not in an unsustainable way). Specialisation allows for deeper engagement with the job in hand and more meaningful results. You’re not iterating as fast as you were but on the other side of the coin you’re delivering more complex, meaningful functionality. Lumpier, bigger, chunkier stuff. Or you’re just producing a whole lot more stuff. One or the other.
Business is good, you’ve grown, you’re up-to 50+ people and things are starting to look less start-up like now. You’ve entered Big Loop, Little Loop. BLLP (Blip) is a maturing business. You’re a smart cookie so you’ve not gone over the top with processes and approach, you’ve created a granular self-managing organisation with individual responsibility. The structure is fairly flat, and everyone still feels connected as a business and organisation. Bigger problems are being solved, more stuff is being delivered, done and shipped. Feedback at an individual team level is still fairly rapid (Little Loop). The feedback loop at the lower level might not be so geared or connected to the customer, but more between teams working on a shared objective.
Customer and product feedback is your bigger stuff, the overall direction of travel. The strategic business direction. You might still be shipping your product quickly, I’m not saying that immediacy has died, but these short deployments are more likely to be chroming the buttons or adding some non-core features (Little Looping), like smiley faces for status updates. And here comes the rub, the problem, the tickle in the back of your throat before you cough. The Big Loop’s are more risky, you’re betting much more with each of these loops because the payload is bigger. To iterate from a fail or misstep is taking you longer. It’s not just that, but the context between the teams, the inter-personal stuff, the understanding is becoming vaguer.
The BLLP is the real test of your start-up, unless you’ve built to sell at this point (i.e. cheated having to solve the problem), or you never intended to scale beyond, say, Loop Loop. BLLP is where charisma, verve, the ability to articulate complex directional approaches becomes really important in the founding team. You need make sure your Little Loops have enough context to deliver the right thing, that they have focus, belief and direction. The Big Loops also need to be well informed from the Little Loops and from the market feedback. The generalists which understand the whole shooting match can be counted on one hand, so they need to be active within the business. Seen, heard and engaged with.
With the introduction of BLLP you need to find that energy from the Tight Loop. Each team within the business should be treated like a team member at the Tight Loop or Slow Loop stage. Communication and inter-team connectivity needs to feel involved and collaborative.
You’ll need to work out what information coming from the Big Loop should make its way to the Little Loops in the shortest possible time. At this point “meetings” start to pop-up, since context can be better understood through question and answer, discursive engagement. Keep an eye on it, because meetings are not great derivers of productivity in themselves and should be used sparingly.
Formatting communication to impart an idea and then have structured feedback, which is captured and quickly actioned, should be given some thought. “Meeting Loops” should not replace feedback loops.
BLLP is your major challenge, don’t think you’ve cracked it once you’re onto Loop Loop, there’s always going to be something to keep you on your toes.
Good luck.
