If you’re part of the leadership team of a scaleup, it's essential that you focus on "Building the thing that builds the thing."
But what does that mean exactly?
It means you need to fall in love with designing your company for success the same way you might be in love with crafting a product or a partnership.
Here are some example tools that help you set the right context for your company - and what they're used for...
Business Context
Business Strategy
Ensures all stakeholders understand what the company is trying to do. Mitigates questions about what’s important.
Product Strategy
Ensures all stakeholders understand the product vision. Mitigates questions about what you're trying to build.
Product vision (design)
Ensures all stakeholders understand what the company is trying to build - mitigates debates about what’s important and helps everyone fast-forward to the future.
Operational Context
New Org Chart
Ensures all stakeholders understand what team they’re on and what they’re responsible for. Also helps the leadership team understand execution capacity and areas that require more investment.
Ways of working guide
Ensures all stakeholders understand their specific roles and how they should interact with leadership. Ensures leaders understand how to serve their people.
Definition of product
Ensures everyone in the company understands the true cost, complexity, and level of quality required for something to be a “product”.
Product principles
Set the product quality bar and create consistency across Squads and PMs.
Engineering principles
Set the engineering quality bar and create consistency across squads and EMs/Engineers.
Performance rubrics for key roles
Ensures that all people know what’s expected of their role and from each of their peers. Should reference many of the concepts in the other tools listed here. Must be used during performance reviews.
Planning Process
Ensures that all stakeholders know how planning works and their responsibilities in terms of participating in planning and maintaining alignment with the plan.
Definition of partner & customer types
Clarifies the specific relationships the company is trying to build and specifies exactly what support and product processes are needed to scale these relationships. Ensures minimal ad-hoc or one-off deals that can't scale.
Sales enablement for each partner & customer type
Helps to mitigate custom work by ensuring that each customer and product type is being “sold” the same thing (lead by product roadmap)
Employee onboarding process
Educates all new recruits about all of the above - ensuring consistent knowledge and culture propagation.