🍜 Your team is a startup

A common theme for people like me who started their career at ramen-profitable startups and then ended up working at progressively larger places - all the way to the large technology multinationals I work for now - is a certain degree of romanticism towards the early days of working at a startup.

"It was so much easy to make things", we muse forgetting about unpaid salaries and neurotic founders. We think about how projects were shipped effortlessly and product after product produced and pivoted at a startup nimble enough to turn on a dime - something lost now we have to work at 1000-sized companies.

The bad news first: it is indeed more complicated to ship products at larger companies. The stakes are generally bigger, multiple other teams need to be involved, and generally speaking the more 'cooks' there are in the product kitchen, the more crazy surprises will turn up before release.

The good news is the main reason that team don't ship, is because they are bad teams rather than teams at large companies. But getting your product to the finish line is, like anything once it scales, a more methodical effort at larger companies. A framework that has helped me a lot in keeping the ball rolling regardless of how large the company I work at is, is looking at my team as a startup on three key verticals: hiring, budgeting/planning, and distributing your product to users.

🤝 Hiring

Some managers like the financial sense of security a large company offers, and tend to get pretty liberal when planning their team's growth. And of course at some particularly feudal corporates someone's standing might be determined by the amount of people he or she manages. To no one's surprise, teams often grow exponentially at large corporates.

Before writing that job description or firing out a sprawling headcount growth plan, however, you should think long and hard about whether doubling the size of your team will help you ship twice as fast.

Imagine you're building your startup: what you're looking for are people who:

• ✅ are diverse in thought and abilities from what's currently in the team: will they bring something new to the table the startup currently misses?
• ✅ are irreplaceable and bring pivotal skills: do I really need this person to ship or drive this product I have in mind?
• ✅ have a proven track record or, for entry-level roles, the drive and hunger to really make it work for the startup.

This all seems obvious, but at large corporations I've often seen teams open up headcount just because they could, and team managers follow the opposite growth direction than if they'd had skin in the game.

I've written about excellent teams before, but this is a topic that's very close to my heart - so here's some of the things you'll see at bad corporations but not at the successful startups you and I fondly remember working at:

• 🚫 Hiring people for 'cultural fit',
• 🚫 having friends, referrals, colleagues or others join your team because you enjoy hanging out with them (also common at lifestyle startups, those usually end up nowhere though)
• 🚫 hiring people before you need them; also known as the curse of 'hire them and we'll find them something to do'.
• 🚫 hiring people for redundancy, and generally 🚫 getting more of the same profile in your team 'just in case'

This all happens a lot when you lose track of how your team needs to growth - and that inevitably leads to sluggish roadmaps and s**t product launches. Don't be like that. Your goal in a team should be the same as that of a founder: make every hire count.

💰 Budgeting and planning

Imagine sinking millions into a product that is not generating any revenue at all, and has a sizeable team slowly working on it day after day. The only explanation for such a violation of the laws of economics is that the product is made by a team at a large corporation that is profitable for other reasons. Millions wasted on a product that isn't going anywhere is nothing more than a rounding error on the company's balance sheet, and the product will continue existing despite not having a reason to.

The company funding this abomination might not care at all, but you should: working in a team like this usually is a good recipe for either burnout, career suicide, or boring internal retirement. And as you'd imagine, it's very rare for successful products to emerge from these teams.

Some of the most successful teams I've worked at instead treat the team or at most the product vertical as a singular business unit that is responsible for its own cost and revenue.

This doesn't mean the product needs to be bootstrapped or profitable from day one: it's reasonable to invest resources in a product that is showing growth and potential - much like a VC or seed fund would do. What's not reasonable is keeping a product that isn't worth its development cost on life support forever.

An important note for finance-oriented readers: this is 🚫 not zero based budgeting. Much like a startup might need capital burn and a sizeable runway to take off, there are justified cases where a team might be unable to justify expenses. And leaning on ZBB usually leads managers to simply game metrics to justify their quarterly expenditures.

What I've personally seen working is a three-pronged approach:

• ✅ financial transparency: everyone in the team and those collaborating with it should -at a minimum - be able to list the primary expenses and cost drivers for the product, as well as the current revenue, growth rate and expected net profits. This really isn't rocket science and helps the team keep their eyes on the prize. Every single startup I've worked at did this on a regular basis during all hands. It's radical, but it works.
• ✅ target planning: the product leads (usually a dev lead, PM lead and sales lead) should be able to align on the next relevant milestones for the product, the deals in the pipeline, which promises are feasible, and how big an opportunity they represent.
  Every startup I've worked at does this out of need - but it's surprisingly common at large corporates to only involve sales once the product is built, or to think development is nothing more than an execution engine. That's a no-no.
• ✅ career accountability: at functioning companies people should feel empowered to make big bets and promise huge things. If they succeed, they should be rewarded for it. If they consistently fail to deliver on their lofty promises, they should be recognized as a snake oil salesman and reassigned to a role that fits them better, preferably outside the company.
  Lack of accountability kills productivity at large companies.

Having understood a product's financial upside and costs, having clear growth targets and a startup-wide plan to get there, and holding people accountable with their investments is something that happens regularly at the best startups I've seen in my career. Why should this not work at your team? Operate like a corporation, but budget like a startup.

🚚 Users and distribution

One of the most important questions you might face at a startup is: 'who's this product for?'. This is a valid question that usually consists of two pieces: why your users should care about - and hopefully pay for - your product, and how will they know your product exists.

For a startup, these are challenging question: marketing is expensive, our world is flooded with advertising, and breakthrough products that 'sell themselves' are very hard to invent anymore without significant capital and R&D.

Having existing customers is an inherent advantage of large corporates - yet something that they reliably fail to exploit. When you start or inherit a product line at an existing company, you should instead ask yourself the same questions: why do my users care, and how do I reach them - with a focus on the second one.

You see, if you're working at a multinational, chances are the company already solved these questions with a core product that users wanted. That might be search for Google, shopping for Amazon, an OS for Microsoft and Apple, and so on.
These companies capitalized on their early success to launch more product lines - but most importantly, they used their existing distribution network to get their new products to a critical mass stage.

You should treat your team as a startup, and understand which needs your product is solving for your users, and how you can leverage the products or services those users are already paying you for, cater to them and upsell them to your next big idea. The principle is the same - just on a different scale and with a much smaller effort than at a cash-strapped startup.

• ✅ ask yourself what unsolved problems your users have, and you'll end up naturally expanding into unaddressed business lines your company is positioned to exploit - just what a disruptive startup will do if you wait for long enough...
• ✅ think about how to reach your existing users, for instance by using company events to upsell them on new products, making your product discoverable from their existing integrations, or enticing them with discounts on what they currently use, in exchange for them trying out your new product, and you'll have access to a market many times bigger than that of your startup competitors.

Startup teams have a hard time letting users know their product exist. But corporate teams have a hard time understanding what their users want from the product being built, and struggle to recapture the early days' magic. That's what people mean when they say "we're too big" or "we can't innovate anymore". Maybe - but your existing customers are a treasure, and can be leveraged as your distribution network. Target them like a startup, and distribute to them like a corporation.

🎁 Wrapping up

If you used to work at a startup and are now at a large company, chances are you miss the speed and innovation of your early days. But it's possible to recapture the magic, if you just start looking at your team as a startup in and of itself. That means:

• Hire sparingly - not to build redundancy, but to expand the team with diverse candidates with unique skills. Make every hire count.
• Plan and budget like a startup: transparency on cost and revenue, openly plan for targets with sales and engineering like you would at a 5-people startup, and hold yourself and your colleagues accountable
• Understand your market like a startup would - but also understand that your market might already exist as the existing users of your company, which can be reached effectively and at no cost. This is something a regular startup can only dream of.

The products you ship will be worth the effort.