The ultimate guide to organising your startup team
The hardest thing about starting something new is finding people to work with and being productive (and happy!) together.
The trick is getting just the right amount of structure to help.
At Poetica, we’ve worked hard at working together well — so we wanted to share what works for us.
We reckon this recipe is great for any team of about our size: we are five people, all in one office.
So, here’s the minimum amount of structure you need for maximum impact:
1. Standups (every day)
A swift update on what everyone did yesterday; and will do today. We end every standup with a check-in on bugs: is there anything in the live product anyone thinks we need to fix asap?
2. Founder time (every week)
If founders don’t talk, things go wrong. We make time for that by having breakfast every Wednesday together. We sometimes even run our own micro-retrospective so we properly check-in with one another. Then anything is up for discussion.
3. Team retrospective and sprint planning (every two weeks)
Every other Wednesday, we kick off with a whole-team retro. Two minutes on things we’re sad about; one minute for things that make us feel ‘meh’ and two minutes to celebrate things that have gone well. We round this up with any specific to-dos that emerge.
Wednesday is a great day to do this: mid-week keeps the ends of sprints productive and means that we don’t waste time ramping up or down.
Sprint planning results in a Trello board of tasks plus an ever-evolving post-it based roadmap that looks a few months out. We like physical things, stuck on the wall — and the satisfaction of ticking them off!
4. 1–1s (every month)
Every month, the person least involved in day-to-day code (Anna) has a 1–1 with each of the people most deep in our engineering (Jono and Abby). These chats can be about anything Jono and Abby want to talk about — they’re intended to give everyone an opportunity to think about stuff outside of the immediate day-to-day work we do at Poetica.
Finally, this only works if your team structure is underpinned by strong values and the flexibility to switch things up that don’t quite work.
Originally published at blog.poetica.com on October 22, 2015.
