#operations

As great as it would be to solve all problems with clearly defined processes and documented knowledge, the reality is that most organisational knowledge tends to be tacit. So, companies should factor this into their ways of working.

How much should competent people, confidently managing their responsibilities, meddle in the affairs of other teams they perceive to be dropping the ball?

People hate process, but process is crucial to scaling a businesses. Today, we explore the difference between good and bad processes, and ways to ensure startups can benefit from standardisation, rather than suffer.

As startups grow, leaders must decide how to structure their engineering teams. This week, we explore some principles for how to divide product development efforts across multiple engineering teams.

Most startups let their organisational structure organically develop as they scale, but organisational design can surprisingly greatly impact outcomes. This week, we explore how org design influences the way leaders and teams solve problems.

Leaders should create a fulfilling, enjoyable, and ergonomic workplace. But over optimising for comfort could lead to mediocre outcomes for your startup.

When I talk to founders, I often hear complaints about the pace of product development. “We used to move so quickly, but now we’ve barely delivered anything all year.” This week, we look at some of the most common causes of reduced software delivery.

Startups often neglect customer retention until churn becomes a severe problem. Successful early-stage startups tend to grow quickly, and growth hides churn. But churn is usually a big problem for startups before they notice it. Churn can seriously hamper growth at all startup stages, and when a startup grows without managing customer retention, it turns into a leaky bucket. Eventually, no matter how much you sell, churn will drag you down.

Most startups under-invest in their product documentation — when you’re busy with reactive customer support, it’s hard to justify proactive work like documentation. However, quality user documentation can dramatically reduce support team workloads and free up product development and customer acquisition resources.

While it’s common for product managers and engineers to look for underlying problems when they receive a feature request, teams rarely apply the same scrutiny to internal operational suggestions. This week, we explore how ideas for new processes can harm a startup.

Airbnb, Figma, and a few other high-profile tech companies have abolished the product manager role within their organisations. What can startups learn from this controversial move?

The best strategies and ways of working for early-stage companies can lead to chaos and quality problems for mature companies. Similarly, early-stage companies that adopt mature ways of working can move too slowly and burn through runway, when they should be finding product-market fit.

The negative impact of cognitive overload on productivity is well-established in research, but startup leaders rarely factor this into their strategy and operations. This week, we explore strategies to reduce cognitive load and improve startup productivity.

McKinsey claims that companies with great developer velocity achieve four to five times faster revenue growth, better operating margins, brand perception, talent management, and shareholder returns. This week, we explore the ways startup leaders can accelerate developer velocity.

When growth takes off, a startup could be on its fifth salesperson, fourth marketing manager, third customer success manager, and second product manager. This week, we explore how goals can set up startup employees for success.

Cognitive overload plagues startups. People frequently bombard you with problems, ideas, questions, complaints, and requests. One tactic that works for individuals and teams is to centralise requests and ideas into queues, which you later prioritise, schedule, and complete.

It is difficult for startup leaders to deliver major projects without neglecting their business-as-usual responsibilities. An operations team can solve this problem for startups by helping leaders with projects. This week, we talk about the best ways to set an operations discipline up for success.

A small, skilled, and effective operations team presents a startup with the opportunity to allow team leaders to focus on their business-as-usual responsibilities without the need to forgo business-changing improvements to how the business runs.

Great delegation is about handing ownership over to your team. Autonomy and accountability are the two sides of the ownership coin. Effective delegation requires a balance of these two forces. When startup leaders fail, it’s often the result of an imbalance between their autonomy and their accountability.

Sometimes, delegation leads to poorer results, and founders regret giving up certain areas of control. Other times, founders retain too much control over duties their team should own. While nobody can get this right every time, startup leaders can improve outcomes if they are strategic about delegation.

Startups can be flippant with cybersecurity, but even small companies are targets for attack. Worse, many startups never outgrow their poor security habits. This week, we explore a few ways startups can improve their security posture.

As your startup grows, responsibilities that used to belong to a single individual will be owned by teams and, eventually departments. This transition is where startup operations become critical. This week, we explore some of the rituals teams should adopt for continuous improvement.

Many early stage startup leaders struggle to accurately calculate the important SaaS-specific business metrics because their profit and loss statement isn’t well-structured for a SaaS business. This week, I’ve compiled some simple tips for aligning your P&L with SaaS norms.

As your startup grows, your team will get busier. More customers means more onboarding tasks, professional services projects, and support tickets. While this is a great problem to have, many startup leaders find it difficult to determine how many people they need in each team. Fortunately, some simple capacity modelling can simplify this process.

One thing I’ve noticed when talking to startups is how DevOps and product management are adopted to solve many of the same problems. While I think most companies will eventually require both, I’ve come to believe that it is more valuable to invest early in DevOps than product management.