The Success Prism and the Power of Perspective
Everyone knows that a startup is the closest thing to a rollercoaster the business world has to offer, but most haven’t actually been on the ride. It is filled with the anticipation of rising to new heights and the terrifying drops that naturally come afterwards. It bends you, twists you, turns you upside down and somehow, after the ride is over, your heart in your throat, you want more.
Rollercoaster design relies on the creation of anticipation and its release. Everyone that goes on a ride knows what they’re going to get, they can see the roadmap laid bear. And though they may get squeamish as they gaze at the shadows cast by the scaffolding before them, they go in with both eyes open.
Founders don’t have the benefit of this foresight. In fact, as much as we try to give assurance and build the moments, we’re on the same ride as our employees laying the next piece of the track as quickly as possible — lest we fall off the cliff. It’s entirely possible we’ll completely F it up. Oops.
Traditional rollercoasters are highly regulated. Their are systems and regulations that keep them as safe as possible. Founders have to rely on a similar set of tools to keep themselves within the lines — their employees and investors. Without the shared perception that we’re moving in the same direction, no one is satisfied with the ride. The only thing worst than a broken ride is a boring one.
Experience at a startup is a highly individualized thing. If a startup were thought of as beam of light, then casting it through a prism would break it into its constituent parts. Each part represents a critical part of the company’s success overall. Here are just some of the most important ones:
- Founders
- Board / Investors
- Engineering
- Product
- Sales
- Support / Success
Each of these groups has their own lens on the universe — they see one color and one color only. This is critical to understand as each person brings that into every meeting they are a part of, every conversation that they have. If everyone starts to see the same color, your organization can quickly become lopsided and fall apart.
To better understand how this quickly can become an issue, look at some of the ways each group sees things.
Founder Prism
Founders vacillate between heaven and hell. Everything is great or everything is shit. Fires seem to exist everywhere, no one has what they need, everyone is unhappy.
Surprisingly, this is very normal and workable for a very long time. The quiet chaos that is startup life quickly normalizes itself. The firefighters of the corporate world, founders are always ready with their bucket.
Smart founders evolve over time to learn how to leverage the light from each of their other teams to give them a better ability to center.
If the founders are too optimistic or pessimistic, it will quickly lead to revolt as employees can only be charmed for so long in one direction.
Investor Prism
Investors are interested in two things: determining your chances for success and maximizing it (I am sure many will take issue with that simplification, so go have a latte). These are actually really compelling points of view, though they can often feel like an unnecessarily heavy foot on the gas pedal.
Great investors, like great founders, will always temper their zeal, trusting that the daily operators have their pulse on the moment. When they’re pushing harder, however, it means either you’re moving in the right direction or they don’t they don’t think they are.
This is why choosing the right investors is so critical to your success.
Engineering Prism
Engineers are the heart of most software startups. They have tremendous power to shape the perceptions of everyone in the company. When they’re excited, everyone is excited. When they’re nervous, everyone starts to worry.
Experienced engineers lean pessimistic, I’ve found. They believe in what’s possible but bring forth a calm conservatism that helps manage expectations. Often, if you’re lucky, however, you’ll find optimistic engineers and these are especially important to your team. They provide a counter-balance to the natural conservancy.
Engineers often struggle with technical debt, code upkeep, maintenance and performance. While everyone wants to run faster and faster, process and patience be damned, your engineering team is constantly a reminder of the challenges of success. Use it wisely.
Having engineering supporting your vision can lead to success. Having them fight it will certainly guarantee it is never realized.
Product Prism
Product is everyone’s favorite realist. While they are often excited by their own ideas, they are forced to temper them with the reality of engineering and infrastructure. Product is compromise.
Product teams can often feel at odds with many in the organization — it’s impossible to please everyone. The business entities have often conflicting needs from the customer entities from the engineering entities. Balance is a perpetual challenge.
Product can bend light when they start to feel that their balance becomes compromise. Product tries to keep the North Star constantly aligned and as they feel forced to abandon that, especially in a wanton manner, the mental exercise becomes a tangible one.
Sales Prism
Sales is the tip of the spear for most organizations. They can usually, and succinctly, tell you what’s wrong with your business before anyone else. They deal with customer concerns and competitors day in and day out unlike anyone else, except maybe Success.
Sales is notorious for saying and doing whatever it takes to close the deal. There’s a lot of truth in that, but usually sales doesn’t get enough credit for how hard it tries to make things true. If we charted how close to the story sales is based on time into the quarter, I’d imagine we see a high correlation between the promise and end of quarter ;)
Sales lives on the edge of a razor blade in almost every startup. Not enough deals happen early in the quarter, leaving far too much pressure at the end. Much like founders, they endure the rapid ups and downs of pursuing and closing prospects.
Sales can be amazing cheerleaders, but as they are constantly on a high or low, they have the potential to bend light just as significantly.
Success Prism
Customer success are the unsung heroes of any company. In its earliest days, all employees are responsible for customer success. This makes it possible to react quickly and to share the responsiblity.
As the company evolves, however, this becomes a dedicated role and eventually a team. Success is forced to put on a positive face for the outside world, leaving their frustration and challenges directed inwards. The success team isn’t complaining for themselves, their complaining for the customer so its our responsibility to listen.
As the fulcrum for problems, it’s no wonder that a certain amount of negativity is always present — too often they can’t solve problems, simply allay fears. This makes success the most useful barometer of product weather.
Taken together, these various perspectives give us a set of biases to work from. Each constituent is correct, from their point of view — but not necessarily right about the company as a whole.
Normalizing these points of views, it’s easier to see if there is agreement about the current status of the company. It’s easy to say “everything is great” or “everything is on fire” but the finer threads that connect those two realities is where success is forged.
Startups must figure out which perspectives are most important and best describe the actual state of the company. If too many people believe things are in one direction or the other, moving the company in the “false” becomes a fool’s errand that engenders more distrust and puts key team members at odds with each other.
Leveraging this “success prism” helps you understand what each team considers success and the conditions that optimize for that success. Calibrating your own perspective helps ground yourself and take action in the right direction. After all, if you’re not sure what direction you’re moving in, it’s likely not the one you want.
Everyone has a different version of success. It’s our responsibility to make them all the same.
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Gregarious Narain is a serial entrepreneur and product strategist. A reformed designer and developer, He writes on his experiences as a founder, strategist, and father on the regular. Connect with him on LinkedIn or say hi on Twitter.
