Growing up, I used to think of process as a dirty word synonymous with tedious, boring, unnecessary. However, over the last few years at SoapBox I have realized that there is both good process and bad process.
Good process allows you to get more stuff done. It should come from observation of the best way to get work done. Good process is a tool that helps your business grow. Bad process prevents you from getting more stuff done and is often imposed by people who aren’t close to the actual work.
When do you need to invest in process? Here are my reflections as we have grown our company over the last 5 years. With respect to process, we have experienced 4 distinct stages of growth:
Stage 1: Everyone knows everything
Founding team (~ 3 people)
These are the early days- you are just getting started. You may not even be working on your venture full time yet. Ideas may actually be written on napkins (save those napkins — they will make for cool mementos one day). With a small founding team — everyone knows everything so there is no need for process, or as we used to say, “3 people, 1 brain.”
Stage 2: Almost everyone knows almost everything
First wave employees ( ~ 7 people)
Congratulations! Not only are you probably working full time on your company, but you have also managed to find a way to pay others as well. Your early employees are most likely junior developers helping you create your first alpha and beta versions of your product. You may also have someone helping with marketing/research on the business side. Even though the company has doubled in size — you still fit around one lunch table — and though you may not realize it at the time, later you will realize how important this is — as most of the company still knows almost everything.
Stage 3: Nobody knows everything
Second wave employees ( ~ 15 people)
This is really a magical time. If you have hired well — then you now have enough capacity to chew through a lot of work, or as we say at SoapBox: “chop a lot of wood”. You will get more done this quarter than you did last year. This is also the time, as a founder, you will realize that you no longer know everything about your company. In fact, nobody does. This is when you need to invest in good process.
Not knowing everything is both good and bad. Think about it — if you did know everything about your company — that would mean you still have a small company. But it’s scary at the same time because this thing is your baby and now, as a new parent, you need to let learn to let go.
Which leads us to…
Stage 4: Everyone knows how to find everything
Third wave employees (~ 20–40 employees)
Once you are more than 20 people, you realize that you are no longer a small startup. Those days of being able to squeeze around one table for lunch feel like a long time ago. People’s roles have become more and more specialized from even a year ago. As a result, people will know less and less about what everyone else is doing in the company. You now have very distinct functional teams that operate in their own way — and for the first time in your company’s history — people will have very different perspectives. New hires who join the company at this point will not benefit from being there in the early days, and will have a harder and harder time forming connections with people outside of their immediate teams. New hires will learn how things are done on their team first — and then more slowly, how things are done on other teams. Everyone will have serious gaps in information.
What is critical is that when people have questions, they have a clear path to find the answers/resources/information/people they need.
An example of Good Process
Don’t let the word “process” scare you — it doesn’t have to be fancy. Here is an example of good process we created at SoapBox several years ago- and still use today:
Each month, team leaders do 1:1 meetings with their team members. We structure the meetings around the same questions each month — so we created a Google Form with those questions pre-populated, and select fields for the date and which team member you met with. So far so good, right? Now the thing that takes this from a resource to a process — is that we also created a google doc that explains (very briefly) what 1:1’s are, why we do them, and a link to the Google Form. The best thing (for me) is that we named the file “How to do a 1:1 meeting” so that it is easily searchable in Drive. This part is key — because for a long time we had made great internal resources that were eventually forgotten about because we had not gone that extra step to program it in as a process.
To this day, every month — when I have a 1:1 I do the same thing — open up Drive, search “How to 1:1…” and click on the doc, which then points me to the form. On one hand, you could say — “well why don’t you just remember next month and go straight to the form?”. That’s not the point — because while I (or anyone) could “just remember”, chances are, eventually you will forget. This way, you have reinforced the process in a way that it becomes “forget-proof” or “busy-proof”.
Since we set up this basic process a few years ago — I have not once needed to spend time searching for resources (more than a few seconds), or worse — recreating resources that already exist. More importantly, I have been consistently recording my 1:1’s over the years. I owe this consistency to having the support of good process.
How to do this at your company:
Here are the basic steps to start building good process at your company:
a) proactively map out the most common questions/pain points from as many different perspectives as possible.
b) create the resources to solve that problem/question (documents/templates etc.)
c) organize these resources in a way that they are discoverable by someone with limited working knowledge of your company.
d) allow a way for these resources to be improved and iterated on over time.
By having good process in place — your company will get more stuff done, do better work, and people will be happier because you have reduced or eliminated the frustrations that occur when someone can’t find what they need.