Three most important things to cultivate as an entrepreneur during execution

John Doerr said that “ideas are precious, but relatively easy. It’s execution that’s everything”. I too believe in this, and entrepreneurs know about this better than anyone else. Entrepreneurship isn't just about the idea and start. It’s about execution. Most often execution would dictate the success of an entrepreneur; even great ideas can bite the dust if the leader isn't executing effectively.

Entrepreneurs often spend most of their day in the dugouts, working hard with team and others, building their idea into a reality. To improve their success probability, entrepreneurs should cultivate

Being positive

Undoubtedly the most important one to master. Building something new for the first time will be like a roller-coaster ride, require loads of positive energy. It is very rare that you know everything at the start. Often you get into challenges that make you feel negative. For example finding good talent, fund shortage, delay in launch, design issues, not going as per plan, etc. The list can go on. Adding to the situation, we tend to have cognitive bias towards failures and negativity by nature. Negativity consumes lots of your energy and create entropy in you, and subsequently into people around you. As per physics success is measured as Integration / Entropy. The more the entropy the less the success. To overcome this and stop worrying about the challenges, entrepreneurs can practice these simple tips

• Acknowledge the challenges, and confront them only to see finding better solutions.
• Think about something in your life that can make you feel good, or reflect on what you are grateful for
• Keep log of good things happened each day in your daily journal, and reflect on them
• Develop positive thinking, be aware of your negative self-talk to recognize them and squash them.
• Cultivate resiliency by training your brain to stay positive though challenging times

Prioritize, communicate, and accelerate

All startups struggle with priorities. You will never be in control of doing something for the first time, and come off as expected. You will have so many unplanned things at hand, demanding your attention. Keeping focus in the midst of chaos is never easy. It is very easy to get bog down into mundane activities, whether they are related to customer focus, team, product design, technical issues, delays, marketing, legal, etc., and forget about what is important right now. Good entrepreneurs keep time aside from mundane activities to prioritize ‘what is important’, and even look to change the course, if needed.

Good entrepreneurs keep time aside from mundane activities to prioritize ‘what is important’, and even look to change the course, if needed.

Communicating ‘what is important’, and bringing alignment within the company towards that is very important for the success an entrepreneur. You should make sure everyone in the company understand ‘what is important right now’ to collectively focus their efforts towards achieving the same. The alignment will help you in a big way.

You should make sure everyone in the company understand ‘what is important right now’ to collectively focus their efforts towards achieving the same.

Now being clear on ‘what is important’, it all depend on how quickly team can build, and validate. You should enable teams with right set of tools and light weight processes to accelerate the build, and validation. Quickly validating with success metrics allow you to pivot rightly.

You should enable teams with right set of tools and light weight processes to accelerate the build, and validation.

Few handy processes for prioritizing, communicating, and executing quickly ‘what is important’

• OKRs can be very handy.
• Bring in or adopt agile development process.
• Consider decision making based on metrics to have clear benefits.
• Keep time slot for prioritization and practice the same. It is always better to have average day schedule to make you feel you are in control.

Focus on outcome

Don’t evaluate the product, or team that builds the product by output, but evaluate them by the results and outcome they generate. Outcomes are usually synthesized from customer problems or needs. So these should be prevailed throughout the product life cycle, either it is strategy, roadmap, milestones, design, validation, team alignment, etc. Often entrepreneurs have tendency to focus on outputs to validate their progress. It’s completely okay to miss the schedule of a feature delivery if it is not going to deliver the desired outcome. There is no point in building just list of features that doesn't result in desired outcome. Also the power of milestones aren't about dates, rather they are about the results and desired outcome. Outputs should help achieving the desired outcome.

It’s completely okay to miss the schedule of a feature delivery if it is not going to deliver the desired outcome.

Few tips to inculcate the focus on outcome

• Know more about your customers and tell stories about them to understand who they are, what their problems are. Then emphasize on the outcome to delight customers instead of just making more features.
• OKRs can also help to focus on customer problems and the outcome.
• Inculcating product mind set instead of project mind set can help the team to focus on outcome.