Designing Speed into Culture: A Founder’s Take on Moving Faster.

I’ve had numerous conversations with entrepreneurs like myself who are looking to “disrupt a market” with precision. Many agree the biggest hurdle in the journey is — getting your team moving faster.

Many of the greatest founders have been on the record saying an office culture that incorporates a healthy dose of speed (not the mid 90's drug), is the secret sauce to a successful product launch. So, how does one begin to design speed into a startup process that was designed to change and pivot as quick as the feedback is given?

5 quick tips on designing speed into culture:

1. Eliminate discussing meaningless “what-ifs” — trying to perfect features that haven’t been validated by your consumers is a waste of time.
2. Create opportunity through execution. You’d be surprised at the opportunity that comes your way with every step of execution. As Gary Vaynerchuck says, “It’s binary”. You can’t expect a year of results from 2 hours of work.
3. Designing speed into your vision means going on offense and challenging your team. Build on the quick micro-sprints and interactions that occur on a day-to-day basis. Take elements learned and executed the previous day and build on them.
4. Work in teams of 2+ and encourage internal competition. When you can breed healthy competition among teams in the office, the productivity increases leading to faster iteration, decisions, and feedback.
5. Design iteration breeds innovation. Often referred to as “rapid prototyping”, iteration brings powerful results if done properly and the process should be kept simple. Most early stage products don’t need hours upon hours of testing and research to learn from the mistakes or missed opportunities that a design prototype is lacking.

A Quick 30 Min Workshop Any Size Startup Can Use:

Set up a time when your product team can conference in or get in the same room to discuss the product vision and goals.

Allocate 30 minutes MAX for this.

Before anything is said by the product owner or team lead, have each member give their 2–3 minute statement of what they believe this product is solving. Based on the feedback and answers of your team, validate the problem, and move into the next phase of the meeting.

Next, ask each person how they would solve it. Let each person answer this question uninterrupted to flush out their thoughts and assumptions.

Finally, it’s your turn.

It’s very important that prior to speaking, everyone has given unguided solutions to problems they believe need to be solved for a good product outcome. This eliminates managerial bias and allows your team to open the box and give individual input that will curate faster brainstorming sessions in the future.

By this time roughly 20 minutes should have gone by (depending on your team size).

You have set the tone to fast collaborative interaction between your product team and more importantly you’ve given each person a voice. No words are needed other than a brief directive to break out and solve the first roadblock to market as a team. Note, if there are a few tasks that can be handled within the allotted sprint, it is wise to split the team and challenge them to meet on their own to solve the problem.

At this point, you have validated the reasons and assumptions for why your team should be building this product and have given a directive to solve the first iteration of your product.

Once you learn to validate quickly, iterate more frequently, and maintain speed, a culture of speed naturally forms, where you will be able to meet the expectations of consumers. With everyone and everything moving faster, innovation and efficiency go through the roof, not allowing your competition to breathe and keeping them on defense. No company in any industry can expect to get ahead with a slow culture; by design, entrepreneurship is all about moving forward and pushing innovation.