What it takes for New Initiatives to become scalable and sustainable growth drivers
“Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is more important than the outcome”. This quote by the famed tennis player Arthur Ashe sums up the crux of why some fail, and others succeed. In the last 16 years of my career, I have had the opportunity to be part of multiple initiatives that were expected to generate large business value. While some failed miserably, the rest became strong pillars of sustainable and scalable business growth. As I reflect on this roller coaster ride, I realize that there is no magic formula to success but there are some core factors that differentiate successful businesses from the failures. Interestingly, I discovered that these factors are the same across domains and industries. I am delighted to share these core factors below based on my learnings and reasons why I believe that we are on the right path to set up successful businesses at Trendyol:
Always ask ‘Why’ before you jump to ‘How’
There are businesses where teams would run in different directions and burn midnight oil to arrive at conclusions which would have no correlation with that of others. These businesses keep shifting the goal post and as expected turn out to be massive failures. Successful businesses, on the other hand, have an extremely clear vision of where they are going. They invest time and effort in pre-work to build a strong plan before setting expectations with all stakeholders and clearly split them into smaller goals for their teams. Another quality successful businesses share is the sustainability of their goals. Long-term goals define the extent of risk willingness, help paint a picture of the competitive landscape and create resource plans for the business.
At Trendyol we value setting clear and measurable goals. There is a shared vision based on long-term growth ambitions, which becomes a precursor for evaluating all scenarios and leads to splitting common goals into KPIs for each team. This process attributes accountability to each team based on their efforts to achieve previously set goals. In my opinion, this is a robust mechanism that defines objectives and therefore guides each team member to work towards a unified mission.
“None of us is as smart as all of us”
Easy to understand but the most difficult to follow.
Whenever I was part of a motivated and skilled team, the initiatives I enjoyed the most were also the initiatives that were most successful. Building a team of committed individuals who are driven and insist on working together is critical to achieving goals. In a fast paced and challenging environment, it is common to have fallouts. However, even in such environments, team goals can not only survive, but thrive through transparent communication. It is imperative to establish ways of motivating and challenging the team while understanding them as people and working with their strengths.
This is something I continue to witness at Trendyol and that I feel is embedded deep in the company culture. Humility, empathy and appreciation are core values shared across teams. A self-motivated team doesn’t need micro-management to be successful and I can see proof of this clearly at Trendyol. This is also reflected in the culture, which, instead of promoting a hierarchical structure, encourages everyone to connect with anyone they can to help solve the issue at hand.
Numbers are more influential than words.
Objective decision making requires a strong data centric approach. I found it much easier to take risks, channel our investments and even help the team prioritize situations when we relied on data led discussions vs purely anecdotal perceptions. Data in its raw form can be confusing, and needs work to become convincing. Scanning, filtering, and cutting the noise are key to designing a clear actionable plan. This is the reason why I love the decision-making process at Trendyol, as it uses an objective and data centric approach that motivates any logical person to win a debate. The organization has strong mechanisms like scorecards and clearly defined templates that not only help standardize all business decisions but also enable a team to take calculated risks.
Be ready to run a marathon through the jungle
When a new initiative is set up, there are bound to be crisis situations. There were many times when the assumptions and excel logics were far away from reality when we rolled out the plans. Such situations created a lot of frustration and self-doubt and almost felt like the end of the road. But as they say, “A bend in the road is not the end of the road…unless you fail to take the turn”. I did survive some of those impediments and can now boast about their success because we didn’t give up. Perseverance, as well as the ability to be agile was critical. We were able to let go of our inhibitions in seeking support from other teams, revisit our plans and amend our resource planning. One of the most important things we did to ensure a scalable and sustainable business was to build strong mechanisms that helped to identify, track and highlight similar issues that might arise in the future. I am glad that at Trendyol I work with agile teams that are willing to accommodate change of plans, consider new options and even challenge each other to be more innovative. This is possible at Trendyol thanks to a high level of transparency driven by mutual trust between all teams. There is bound to be high volatility and unpredictability in comparison to our plans with many new businesses and services that we want to offer our customers. But I am sure that with this nimble approach at Trendyol, we will be able to adapt and build at scale.
This is definitely not an exhaustive list and there is no easy magic solution to build a successful business from scratch. But at the same time, I have always found businesses with these core factors to usually succeed, and I am sure that we will continue to have many such successes to boast about at Trendyol.
