Startup collaboration for speed
In a startup speed is everything. Your ability to make quick decisions and adjust based on user feedback is crucial to moving faster than your competition and building a successful company.
Many startups today like ours Visibuild are distributed, our team is based in Melbourne and Brisbane and we work in a hybrid model mixing office time with the flexibility to work from home.
We started Visibuild in 2021 during one of the many Melbourne lockdowns. This turned out to be a brilliant time to start a company as it meant we could take the learnings from how to work well remotely and bake that into our culture from day one. Taking the good and leaving the bad practices behind.
Here’s our approach to collaboration for speed at Visibuild.
1. Create an async-first collaboration culture from day one
The only way to move quickly with a distributed company is to be able to work together to solve problems and make decisions without relying on being in the same room or even on the same video call.
If you need to get everyone on a call or in a meeting just to move a project forward everything will happen too slowly. This is an old-school mindset that some companies struggle to move away from even with the introduction of remote work and video calls.
To move quickly without losing collaboration, default to async-first rather than a synchronous meeting-first culture in your team.
Empower your team to take control of their time and not feel as though they need to respond to messages immediately if it means shattering their focus.
2. Get good at communicating ideas in writing
The key to great async collaboration is having everyone on your team able to communicate ideas in writing.
When you have to write your ideas out rather than just rambling on in a meeting it forces you to think more deeply and get clear on what it is you’re trying to say.
It also makes it easier for everyone to understand and give feedback. Especially for those who might not feel confident to speak up in a large group with many strong voices.
Whether it’s a customer problem (how to speed up onboarding) or an internal business problem (how to improve our product analytics), at Visibuild we always start by writing out a definition of the problem in what we call a “problem doc”.
Written in notion problem docs are then shared and the feedback process begins.
If there are aspects to the problem we haven’t considered these are quickly brought up by the team, bolstering our problem understanding and leading to better quality solutions.
3. When work is shared async make time to read it and provide feedback
Async collaboration only works if everyone reads the work and takes the time to provide thoughtful comments or ask questions. Work is shared constantly in our team and that doesn’t mean you must stop what you’re doing right away but it does mean baking in time to provide feedback in a timely manner so that things move forward.
At Visibuild we encourage everyone to block out time in their calendars to review shared work.
When you give your team the agency to run their own schedule rather than forcing them into a meeting to listen to your idea and provide feedback, everyone continues to move quickly without slowly down the broader team.
4. Thoughtfully design your team’s meeting schedule
Recurring meetings are like product features, it’s much easier to add them than it is to take them away.
If you run into an issue where lines of communication broke down or collaboration didn’t happen effectively resist the urge to reactively create a new meeting in the calendar to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen again.
Instead think about how you can adjust your async collaboration approach first.
Slowly-by-slowly meetings can add up and you and you’re team and left with less and less time to do deep work. Less time to work asynchronously.
At Visibuild we’ve designed our team meetings to ensure our distributed company remains connected, provide space for healthy debate and to share context. We respect the time of our employees and make sure that every meeting we add has a purpose and if needs to be on the calendar.
We also periodically review our meetings and make sure they still make sense.
To move quickly you need to ensure that everyone in your team has enough time to do their best work. Establishing an async-first collaboration culture will allow you to ensure you can foster healthy collaboration and keep your team moving forward without burning time on meetings.
We’ve been lucky to establish this culture from day one at Visibuild its equally possible in an established company, it simply requires a mindset shift and a change in behaviour.
Good luck!
