Is Our Startup Growing Too Fast?
Over the past couple of months, we’ve gone through new experiences and challenges of team dynamics such as communication and organization issues. Since Sheetsu has experienced a lot of growth, we’d love to share our experience with all of you.
One such problem that startups can run into is organization structure, or how a company defines roles and supervisions. Managing people can be hard, but it’s an extremely important responsibility in the most organizations, both startups, and big corporations. When we started working on a startup more than 6 months ago, we were around 4 developers- today we are 8 people. This is incredible how many new perspectives it brings us and how much it helps to move forward.
Until pretty recently, we didn’t have any process at Sheetsu when it came to how we create new features or built new products. Initially, we were quite satisfied with the structure of our team: people talking together all day and making decisions together.
This worked well when we were smaller, but as our startup grew, we’d like to move from a ‘4 developers organization’’ to an excellent prospering company (within the startup framework).
Communication is a must for every type of organizations
When everyone in an organization understands their company’s structure, they’re not stepping on each other’s toes. It’s important to confirm that there are no “holes” present in the skillset needed to make your business successful.
When your company is growing fast, and you’re hiring new employees, make sure that they’ll solve specific issues the startup has identified. By carefully planning, startups can avoid some common problems like:
- The startup has market/product fit and needs a marketing leader and marketing staff
- The startup is increasing productivity- some of the hires may be support staff
- The startup is creating innovative solutions and needs new engineering experts
Unfortunately, as you hire more people, the communication may become chaotic and less efficient.
The organization needs to put in place culture, training, product management, procedures, etc.
The more significant your company is, the more things you have to deal with
Right back in the early days of Sheetsu, when we had one goal: to connect Google Sheets to anything, we didn’t even think that our solutions would meet customer’s expectations and increase their efficiency. But as you may know from our earlier article we’ve failed many times. There is no doubt that we must put so much work to use the power of Spreadsheets and sometimes our idea doesn’t go along with the customer needs.
Anyways, it’s important to note that everyone’s doing great work within the model we have, despite all daily difficulties. Now we have a strong team such content writers, a content marketer, a growth hacker, programmers, etc.
What we’re now starting to realize is, we need to manage lots of things like:
- Human resource management process
- Writing the HR manual
- Expense reports
- Branding guidelines
- Division Structures
- Lots of paperwork :)
Having skilled and able managers is therefore critical to any organization’s success. By refining our team’s process, each of us can stay a lot more focused and make sure that we’re doing the highest impact work for our users.
Lessons learned:
- Very different management tools and skilled people are needed to guide your company through a new phase
- You have to play by your own rules
- Hire the person who listens to you and understands company’s values
- Don’t be afraid of new challenges. Eventually, you’ll find out what is the best solution for you
- Communicate properly with your co-workers
- Refine your team’s processes
Drop us an email at team@sheetsu.com. We are happy to talk with you.
Happy Hacking ^^!
