Three Sorry Excuses for Startups

A few weeks back I wrote about how big companies need to cut startups some slack on their “should haves,” because with limited resources, startups are brutally prioritizing their “must-haves.”

However, lately I’ve been seeing more and more startups hide behind their emerging company status as an excuse for deprioritizing critical, foundational aspects of their businesses. Culture is one example of an element that sometimes gets short shrift. Here are a few others, with some ideas about how to incorporate them relatively easily into your already existing top priorities.

1. Clear communication

In my early days as a consultant, I’d meet with leadership and their teams — hundreds or sometimes thousands of employees — to get oriented. Why does everyone think they’re here? Not surprisingly, along with some fascinating responses, some of which I wish I could unhear, others of which will make great material for that novel I’ve been wanting to write, there were often huge communication gaps. How does this particular group support overall company goals? How should they prioritize their time? What is important to let people know?

In a company with thousands of employees this is understandable. But these same communication issues also exist at companies with orders of magnitude fewer employees. Why? In some cases it is legitimate, rapid growth and onboarding issues that can be addressed. But more and more often, communication is actually too infrequent or non-existent. And here are the most common excuses:

“We’re a start-up, so things change all the time. People need to deal with that.”

• Unclear or shifting goals are not excuses to avoid communication. They make communication all the more vital. As Donald Rumsfeld would say, there are lots of known unknowns, which you might not feel ready to admit or to articulate. But calling them out and providing context helps align everyone, so you can move as quickly as possible, re-prioritizing as it becomes necessary. The military calls this a “Mission Command” culture, in which everyone has a clear understanding of both the mission and the tactical problem, increasing the odds of success.

“Engineers don’t like communicating.”

• Engineers (and some other people) may not like communicating, but do you know what they hate even more? Wasting their time working on irrelevant or redundant things. First of all, this is a huge, and often inaccurate stereotype. Second of all, even if it were true, we all have to do things on the job we don’t necessarily enjoy. Neither of these are reasons not to communicate. And clear communication will also reduce micromanagement and more meetings, two other things that engineers — and the rest of us — generally dislike.

“If anyone has any questions they can just ask me. I’m approachable and available.”

• Unless you and your team are telepathic, just being around the office is not an excuse for not communicating. People need to know where to start. So throw them a bone. Tell them what you are thinking and what you are doing. As approachable as you think you are, it’s not a guarantee that people find you approachable, nor do they always want to be chasing you down. That makes you a bottleneck, which nobody likes. Interestingly, talking to people tends to increase your perceived approachability.

Good communication means an exchange of information that increases understanding and allows someone to act upon it. As key elements of your product and go-to-market strategy come together, make a commitment to yourself and your team to build communication deliberately into your workflow for optimal context, content, and clarity. You probably do this informally already — how often should we meet? who should take notes? what collaboration tools should we use? But the more you enforce it — and iterate it as your needs change — the better. No one communication vehicle grants you automatic immunity from further interaction. It’s one delivery mechanism of many that will help you reach your goals.

2. Good planning

“Planning is not a good idea for a startup,” is a terrible excuse I hear to avoid planning, among others.

Yes, you need to be nimble as a startup. Yes, things change and you need to act on great ideas spontaneously. Yes, your process is agile and iterative, I get it. And yes, I did live through a great deal of “How Google Works” and know that Jonathan Rosenberg says that planning doesn’t leave time for pleasant surprises and exploration. Mr. Rosenberg may be a self-hating planner, but as the story goes, he apparently was also an inflexible one with unnecessarily over-engineered slides, which was why Larry called him out for it. Please don’t throw those who plan better — including many exceptional Googlers, ex-Googlers, and otherwise — under the bus!

Good plans are less about the plans themselves and more about communication. Usually, it’s not just one person or one team who can change things around without it rippling through elsewhere, regardless of a company’s size. Engineering has code freezes; sales makes promises; your PR firm calls press; genies leave bottles. At some point, you need to commit to your choices. What a good plan does is give everyone a sense of when and how things might change, and when you need to be committed. You make the plan precisely so you can be nimble, comfortable, and successful with ambiguity, even when the sh-t hits the plan….

For example, at a startup, your early sales wins will happen likely because your sales person is very savvy about knowing what to sell based on what currently exists, and on what (s)he’s pretty sure will exist by the time (s)he’s sold it. (This goes for great sales and business development people regardless of company size, by the way!) How do you maximize your revenue — a key priority, no doubt — and minimize unnecessary commitments or customization? Give your sales team a clear product roadmap with rationale and context for your priorities — clear communication and good planning. This allows sales to look for alignment with prospective customers, steer them toward these prioritized features and away from others, and avoid opportunities that diverge too much from the roadmap. Then they can make their own plans and keep product teams informed. This interplay gives you more customer feedback, directly and through your sales teams, often providing some of those moments to display that nimbleness and spontaneity startups rejoice in displaying for big payoffs.

So commit to build and iterate planning into your product and sales workflows. Planning is yet another one of those vital, internal tools you should view as a product. Plans are not just to-do lists. Good plans include, even at a high level, actions, dependencies or required resources, expected completion dates, and responsible parties, with as much flexibility as you’d like and is possible. Your plans should be easy to set up and maintain, easy to revise as needed, and easy for its audience(s) to understand, again, providing the proper context, content, and clarity to align everyone.

3. Strong product foundation

“We’re moving so fast, of course things will break.”
“We’re a startup; nothing’s going to be perfect.”
“People working at startups need to be comfortable being uncomfortable.”

All of the above are true. But none of these are excuses for not having a solid product foundation.

Clear communication and good planning are essential to a strong product base. When you have a good product lead and supportive leadership who communicate and plan well, teams get the time the product team needs to get things done excellently. On the other hand, pushing people to meet false or unrealistic deadlines leads to all sorts of problems. Teams cut corners unnecessarily, leaving instability in core functionality that’s often difficult to go back and fix, as the focus becomes shipping for its own sake versus meaningful completion. People get frustrated with seemingly arbitrary decisions and don’t feel respected when they feel their estimates or needs aren’t taken into account. Without the encouragement to provide proper time estimates and adhere to deadlines — because they’ll always miss them anyway — the product and its go-to-market execution suffer. Demoralized employees rarely give you their best work.

As with communication and planning, I’m not suggesting you take an over-engineering or perfectionist approach to your base product functionality. Product excellence is not the same as product perfection. Making sure you take the time to get the core right is essential to long term success. Ironically, this often means even more ruthless must-have prioritization is required, as building things excellently tends to take more time than you think you have. And while there’s a lot you can make with duct tape in an emergency, you’ll increase the value of your product and your company if you invest and build the real thing.

Clear communication, good planning, and strong product foundations are at the core of good leadership, regardless of your organization’s size. And exceptional leaders build amazing companies. They don’t make excuses.

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Originally published at karenroterdavis.com on May 13, 2015.