Re:Startup: Acquiring the culture of startup to enterprises
In this piece, I will cover the meaning of re-startup, its benefits, and how to acquire a Re-Startup culture in your organization.
Understanding Startups:
Most of us belong to the tech industry, we get the news of startups launching every other day. We have seen entrepreneurs who have launched and grown startups over and over again. If you are motivated by such readings and want to have your own establishment someday, you should take a step back first and understand the meaning of startups.
A startup is not merely a money-making business. Unlike small business, startups need risk, innovation, validated market research, and a full-proof business model to start.
On top of that startups should consider disrupting the current market structure with their new business idea. Example: Quora, Slack, Airtable etc.
Some of the readers may feel it’s not for them as their work is significantly bigger and making profits already. Your opinion may change after knowing how fast you can accelerate your progress and results irrespective of the size of the company, by applying the concept of Re:Startup practically.
If you want to think about it in a different way, you can check how many (stable) companies are falling just because they couldn’t measure the market demand of 2021 in the post-COVID situation.
Also, don't forget to check how many startups have actually evolved when they took advantage of such a situation.
What big firms should learn from startups?
Once a startup crosses fundraising and is working towards product development, they follow the build-code-learn loop.
- Validate the idea
- Create MVP/ Add new feature
- Get data and learn user behavior
- Add new idea based on the data generated
- Repeat
All companies go through this stage once. With time products became stable, and a big-time goes for maintenance. The learning part may decrease resulting in lesser ideas coming out.
At this stage, entrepreneurs/leaders generally start working on newer products or finding a way to re-disrupt the market with newer ideas as per the new demands. The solution to achieve this is termed as Re:Startup.
Re-startup as a cultural attitude
Pause and answer the following questions:
- What did you learn yesterday?
- When was the last time your idea successfully impressed a user?
- Did you challenge yourself enough for your current tasks?
- Do you think yourself approachable enough?
- When was the last time you had a conversation with your colleague about how was their weekend?
The list may go on and you can drop me a message if you want to discuss more. The point I want to raise is if your answer is no (or nothing) for all, you may need to reconsider how to utilize your potential at best without being overworked. Using your best potential does not mean you need to work overtime.
Working overtime is working harder. Challenging yourself is working smarter to learn and innovate in a team that supports it. Working time can actually be reduced by working smarter.
How TeamSpirit support Re:Startup culture
- The official Kaizen (The Improvement Sprint),
For me, this is the best part. TS follows two to three weeks dedicated to kaizen sprint at the end of each release. This sprint is for improvement tasks, resolving technical debts, coming up with new ideas, and creating POCs for innovations and get a chance to improves the stakeholders.
- Technical Communities
A proposal which started last year, apart from sprint development which focuses on developing user requirements we allocate 10–20% of our time for community activities. It started from a few tech-communities and later exceeded to 8 communities with members showing more interest. The communities are focusing on long-term growth planning and outcomes. Here is the list of some communities we have right now
- Workshops (Technical/ Non-technical)
Learning new things involves exploring new things. Being a developer, I was surprised by getting an invitation for a storytelling workshop (which was optional). We encourage others to enjoy Friday through workshops be it a coding workshop, storytelling, or knowledge sharing by QA.
- Sprint Planning, Development, Retrospective, and Review
We deliver what we plan through sprint planning, retrospective, and review. We are keeping it in a way that everyone enjoys working together for a team that embraces learning.
Last year’s employee survey gave us the badge for Great Place To Work, both in Singapore and Japan.
Finishing Up
The key is not to forget to challenge yourself in your work, take new initiative and learn. Even if you fail, learn from the mistake and re-invent.
I hope this piece helps you get to know the unknown.
Do share your opinion on whether you enjoyed getting an overview of a Re-Startup culture. Take the points you like and add the points you want to experiment with. We truly believe in experiments.
At last, don’t forget to hit the claps if you have enjoyed the article.
