#people
Every day, a great strategy fails in a startup because a leader underinvested in trust and relationship building or unnecessarily took autonomy away from individuals or a team. This week, we explore how Joseph Nye’s framework for soft and hard power can help startup leaders to motivate their teams and enact change in their organisation.
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.
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.
Engineers are the most important recruits for early-stage software startups, but many startups fumble their first engineering hires because they don’t understand what type of engineer they need. Even a great engineer can fail at a company they’re not suited to. Fortunately, there are a few broad principles that startup leaders can employ.
To build a startup, you need to build a great team. Recruiting can be tough for early-stage startups, though. This week, we explore how a strong employer brand can give startups a recruiting advantage.
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.
By being intentional about what types of experience are most important for each role, and considering team-wide capability rather than individual capability, leaders and founders can create powerful teams and nail the first and most crucial step of startup building.
Many leaders view their responsibilities as a list of leadership and management tasks they need to complete. This mindset ignores that the best way for a team to get most things done is through shared ownership and leadership. This week, we explore why leaders should delegate to shared responsibilities rather than individuals.
Assembling your team is one of the most important responsibilities for any founder or leader. But, most startups I’ve worked with fail at effectively onboarding new staff, which can lead to false starts and failure.
While every company should approach this somewhat different, there are a handful of principles that apply to most product companies that I think you should consider.
While losing staff to customers and partners is pretty common in B2B SaaS, I would advise against having any sort of non-compete/anti-poaching clause in your standard customer and partner terms. First of all, this is bad for your employees. As an employer, you should be competing in talent market by providing a great place to work, with fair compensation and benefits, not trying to lock them in with contracts they don’t have any influence over and may not even be aware of. If an employee wants/needs to leave, and their best prospects are with a partner or customer, it’s unfair to limit their options.
A playbook I’ve used to describe the responsibilities of a software engineer for hiring and professional development purposes.
Product Manager might be the least standardised role in startups. Across different org profiles (e.g., startup, scale up, corp tech, big tech), PMs do very different things. Even within those profiles, the PM role can be incredibly diverse. Here’s a playbook I’ve used to describe the responsibilities of a product manager for hiring and professional development purposes.