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Entropy, Agile & Culture

In the early stages of a startup, everything is about proving hypotheses or ideas and cracking the product-market fit. Along the way, when it comes to scaling stages, it becomes messy, and some people will start to look at how we optimize the process or put a sort of process to make it scalable.

Even when there is some process, it tends to move towards disorder or broken if left unmaintained. That’s what we called the law of entropy. We can not set and forget what we developed. An excellent example of this is, leaving a new house alone and it will be broken at some points here and there without maintenance. It is inevitable.

There are some regret moments when it comes to a real mess. “What to do to avoid the entropy?”, “is it possible to make it less messy?”. Some of these regrets bring me to think that putting this sort of process is the starting point to understand where we are. Understanding our starting point is the way to improve it over time.

And it clicked in my thought that it is close to how agile our mindset in the early stages of a startup will determine how better we fight this law of entropy. Agile is a mindset. A set of values and principles guide us in dealing with uncertainty and responding to changes.

I want to share some values that I learned in hard ways that I believe are important to have in the early stage of a startup that I hoped I knew beforehand.

1. The mindset of Focus on delivering value
   The startup is all about growth. And to achieve maximum growth, founders or stakeholders tend to fall into two traps.
   —
   a. Build Trap (by Mellisa Perri, https://melissaperri.com/blog/2014/08/05/the-build-trap) shows that the number of things we produce is no guarantee company success. The building is the easy part of the product development process. Figuring out what to build and how we are going to develop it is the hard part.
   —
   b. Tech trap, Tech comes first before problems. Just because a technology is on hype, that’s not the cue for everyone to adopt it. Understanding the problem to solve that will deliver value then choosing the technology that will effectively support it will bring better outcomes.
2. The Mindset of People over process.
   It doesn’t mean we do not need a process. Instead, Putting people over process means ensuring everyone is aligned and working towards goals before implementing anything else, whether that is different tools or new processes.
3. The Mindset of Respond to changes.
   Startups are messy. Usually, after a startup passed product validation, that survived with not scalable business and product. It will become cluttered. So everyone in the team needs to have the right expectation working in startup life. (it will be tough for someone that comes from a stable company in their previous experience). This ability to respond quickly to change (not surprised, embrace it) will help the business move faster.
4. The mindset of Start small. Do things that don’t scale.
   Think that everything that your team made is an investment. You don’t want to make an investment that doesn’t make significant growth to your company. And every investment has its risks. Starting small is to minimize the risk in a startup. You don’t want the time spent by the tech team for three months doesn’t fruitful or to fail because the project is too big. (i.e., just because google keep your email data, you don’t necessarily build your mailing system on your own)
5. The Mindset of Continuous improvement & learning cycle.
   There is nothing new under the sun, and there is nothing perfect under the sun. The faster a product/process iterates, it will be better. Iterate means repetition with better improvement. Usually, what makes improvement dull is bias. The more data points we gather, it helps to learn better.

The agile mindset is essential because it will drive behavior, repeated behavior goes habits, habits will cause culture. And good culture will produce good business.

Here I share excellent and practical steps that will help us build the foundation of a good culture. (by Tim Brady — Building Culture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnNHW6TYv5I)

1. Be proud & crazily enthusiastic about the problem you are solving
   In startup life, there are some hard days to move on. So it is super crucial for founders to be proud & crazily enthusiastic about the problem they are solving, so the founder’s action will inspire the team to follow.
2. Create a long-term vision.
   Engaging vision drives people to trust. A more robust vision helps founders to inspire others.
3. Create a list of values and model them!
   It doesn’t have to be fancy. What is more important is that the founders have to model them in their daily life. It can be modified, added, or removed along the way.
4. Align the value to the customer
   The value will represent how your business talks to the customer, how the user experienced the service or products created by the employee that inspired the value. (i.e. pro customer)
5. Discuss how important diversity environment
   It doesn’t mean race. Employers tend to hire an employee that has the same way of thinking, and it is not good to have a team with only one perspective of thinking in a brainstorming session. So it is vital to have the deal between founders and early team how important diversity is in the startup.
6. Make it a lifetime process. Improve it over time.
   Make time to talk about culture between founders even in the early stages (every two or three months). Talk about what is doing well and what it needs to be improved in terms of culture.