How Classical Music Transformed Our Team Culture

Peter Vicherek
Partsimony
Published in
5 min readOct 6, 2020

Introduction

There are three critical challenges facing every startup. First, delivering a viable product that meets the market needs as quickly as possible to start generating revenue, paying salaries, and scaling the business.

Second either having the clairvoyance to predict changes in market demands or ensure proper structures are in place to create high-performance teams that can rapidly adjust to the shifting demands of the market.

Finally, creating a company culture that thrives, encourages a “Discovery” mindset versus a “Problem Solving” mindset (more on this later in the blog), and supports team empowerment while reducing toxicity and engineer fatigue — a by product of Project Management methodologies, like Agile.

This blog explores the framework we created at Partsimony to address the above challenges. At the end we will provide the Notion template that we use. We believe the framework will lay the groundwork for world-class engineering teams moving forward and we hope it can provide value to you and your team.

Project Management in a Startup World

Countless books have been written about different project management methodologies like Agile, Scrum, or Waterfall. While these work in theory, the results do not always meet the expectations and lead to situations where companies attempt to shoehorn a solution to their needs rather than finding a solution that fits them, and more importantly, scales as they grow.

Without proper structure and clear direction, teams run the risk of putting resources towards tasks that do not serve a business goal. This is detrimental to early-stage startups that need to be resource-efficient in order to thrive.

However, many Project Management methodologies have crippling problems: Waterfall — leaves no room for changes, which is not ideal in a startup world where the team has to act on new information. Agile — the emphasis on strict communication is not suited for these times where remote work is becoming mainstream and does not encourage team empowerment but rather dependence on a single entity.

Empowering Your Team With Objectives

A leader never doubts the capacity of the people he is leading to realize whatever he is dreaming” — Benjamin Zander, Music Director of the Boston Philharmonic and Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestras.

The above quote sums up perfectly how we believe world-class teams should operate. At Partsimony we use OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) to allow each team member to establish individual quarterly stretch goals (objectives) that are quantifiable (key results). These Objectives can be either specific business goals or personal development goals.

By empowering your team with objectives you:

  1. Create a culture of trust — each team member takes ownership of their objectives and understands how it supports the rest of the team. Our DevOps engineer works to make application deployment seamless while our Designers and Engineers execute on features. All working in tandem towards driving the product and business forward.
  2. Foster innovation — each team member has decision making power to execute on their objective, using their expertise to come up with creative solutions to tackle the objective.
  3. Eliminate developer fatigue — when team members feel as if they have decision-making power, micromanaging is removed from the equation which leads to increased developer productivity.

Since Objectives are long term stretch goals, how does this framework account for short term features and, more importantly, prioritizing features?

Discoveries, Not Problems

“How fascinating!” is a phrase you might hear if you have watched an Interpretation Class from Benjamin Zander. It is a phrase he uses when a student makes a mistake, believing that they have to play perfectly. But these mistakes are not really mistakes, they are discoveries.

When we reframe “Problems” as “Discoveries”, two fascinating things happen:

  1. You eliminate Negativity Bias. The word “problem” carries a negative connotation and can lead to situations, similar to ours, where our Problems page becomes a dump of issues that we avoided (afterall, who wants problems in their life).
  2. It allows you to categorize and prioritize features based on how those features directly impact the business. Below are the main categories we use:

Ideas: Features that would enhance the business/application but are not critical to obtaining customers.

Research: Research that needs to be done before implementing a discovery, can link to an Idea, Bug, or Roadblock.

Bugs — Unintended problems in the platform that need to be addressed

By reframing problems as discoveries, we noticed a difference not only in how we operate and communicate, but the atmosphere of the team in general.

Tracking Progress With Sprints

To ensure we are tracking progress successfully, we link Discoveries to Sprints. This allows us to track the progress of a Discovery as it relates to an OKR and gives us comfort knowing we are always working towards an objective.

Each Task under a Discovery has a Timeline attached to it, in Notion we create a linked database to Discoveries and filter on tasks which have timelines (a link to the Notion template can be found at the end of the article).

Key Takeaways

After implementing the above building blocks, we established a direct link from long-term business objectives, to features actively being worked on broken down by individual tasks — a birds eye view with the ability to drill down to individual components.

We noticed major improvements in our team morale by switching from “problems” to “discoveries” as well as easier onboarding of new team members. They found it intuitive to add their objectives and knowing they were trusted to excel in their role made them feel part of the team. Our feature prioritization improved and we noticed overall quicker delivery on features.

Finally, we found that 3 team meetings per week was ideal for us. Monday — progress updates. Wednesday — check in to address concerns, Friday — end of week recap to see if there are any new insights or learning outcomes.

How Your Team Can Get Started

We want to share this system with everyone else in the hopes that it will provide a more defined structure to their Notion pages. Click here for a link to the notion pages, feel free to use the template as you wish.

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