growth, team, managementI was wondering at what stage of your startup you should define everyone’s role.
In the beginning it is very hard when you are starting because it is organised like a big brainstorming and when growing you don’t want to have any gaps or people doing the same thing twice. Moreover, as soon as you are hiring people they must have somehow a definition of their tasks, do they ?
Even though it might depend from a startup to another, what is the best time to define positions ?
You’re right that the answer varies from startup to startup. So take my advice with a pinch of salt. This is a suggestion, and it won’t fit all cases.
Remember that a start-up is a project first and a business second. So use the tools and disciplines of a style of project management that suits the context.
Then guess what? You learn who’s great, who’s good, who’s OK and who’s unsafe to handle a particular type of individual task. You learn who’s best getting an urgent job done to a tight deadline, and who excels in keeping everything moving forward. You learn who can build rapport with customers, who thrives in a chatty subteam, who can be effective sitting in Starbucks three timezones away. You learn who is constantly looking for opportunities to grow and develop their skill set, and who wants to stick close to their comfort zone.
Life is never quite as neat as, everyone ends up doing the job they’re best at, and the startup needs exactly the people it has today. But if you build great working relationships where you learn one another’s strengths and weaknesses, it will be easier, more meaningful and lower friction when the time comes to define formal roles and responsibilities.
Roles (as in job description) help decide who is responsible to tackle this or that task (as in who is owning what). In an early stage startup, of course, you usually have everyone owning a lot of tasks that go far beyond their job description. And that’s fine.
What counts in practice in an early stage startup is to have someone around who is accountable for defining (when no volunteer shows up) who gets held accountable for getting [task goes here] done by [deadline goes here]. Anything short of that will lead you to unease due to lack of direction or chaos or both - or worse.
As you grow you’ll eventually get past the first few hires and want increasingly precise roles and job descriptions. It’s really about mental shortcuts to decide who owns what and accountability.
In terms of timing, you’ll know it’s time when you see it in some sense: think “oh, hold on, this blew up in our face, and nobody was in charge of it?” or “why am I always being asked who should be held accountable for this or that?”. In the startups I’ve interacted with it usually started to occur pretty quickly after they started recruiting. (Employees aren’t happy when they’ve no idea what’s expected from them.)
Tip #1: By the time you hit 20-25 employees you’ll also want written processes in place across the board. (If you don’t do that, you’ll end up with organizational debt down the road.)
Tip #2:
because it is organised like a big brainstorming
On ne navigue pas un paquebot dans un champ d’icebergs en prenant des décisions en comité.
(You don’t navigate a container ship in an iceberg field by making committee driven decisions.)
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