I have been so fortunate as to be part of several young companies and starting new teams in existing organizations. This post is is a summary of my subjective observations, you should treat it as such.

1️⃣ Introduce departments too early

All young companies wants to grow up and become proper organizations. In order to get a head start, many young companies start splitting up their organizaiton into departments way too early in an attempt to look good for stakeholders and potential hires. “See, we know how to set up a business!”

The issues is that doing this when a company is just 10-12 people (I have experience this myself on more than one occasion) is setting your self up for problems you could avoid. With the introduction of constructs such as product, sales and operations you are creating boundaries and a need for synchronization. When you have a department, of course there needs to be someone running it. Hence you need to introduce a leader. Once you have three or more leaders, then there needs to leadership meetings, etc. What the company has been doing is creating the constructs which prevent larger companies from being efficient. Communication lines multiply, hand-overs and synchronization is introduced. You also formalize the tension which is between say sales and product.

I have been part of companies lulling themselves into the corporate mentality way before it is required (yes, it might be required at some point. However not when you are so few people). As we all know, the c-title people in young companies are usually the ones who where there first. Not necessarily the ones who’s best equipped to handle the role (I have first hand experience of this, I was CTO because I was the first hire!). You might need to have all kinds of titles and thing in your pitch deck to investors, but you should probably not actually have any of it in reality until there is a dire need of them. There is no going back once you introduce it.

2️⃣ Prematurely introducing processes & practices to scale

Software organizations are like crazed teenage fans when it comes to processes and tools. They blindly follow their idols without really taking the time to contemplate why. You will see small companies mimicing companies the aspire to become, as they think that is what has made the great. That is a grave mistake, as most unicorn or gazillion euro evaluated company probably did not start out with those processes. They needed to install certain processes because of any number of things. Maybe they grew into a thousand people company in two months. Perhaps they acquired a company in a different timezone. Someone gave them a truck load of money and they suddenly need to ramp up quickly. Or they have a total lack of trust in their organization and therefor install rigid processes.

Whatever the case may be, one of the key factors for rapidly growing small companies is their lack of these processes. It is a huge competitive advantage to not have to do the Spotify model (which is the go to model of choice the past years in my country Norway). Instead of trying to do what the big ones do, young companies should cherish and embrace the time when they don’t need any of it. It is the most fun you’ll probably have and the time you’ll be having the most creativity and being the most productive. Young companies should postpone installing processes as long as possible and most likely invent their own thing once they do.

The same thing goes for tools. There are certain tools which inevitably will make your organization less efficient (yes, I am talking about that product starting with Jir). Why does a 4 person development team need a bug tracker? If you only have the capacity to do two things in a cycle, do you really need a roadmap tool? I would say no. In my first startup we had a bug tracker, it was a sheet of paper which could only fill 10 bugs. If there where more, we’d either need to solve one or take one out. The sheet was visible for everyone (this was in ancient times when we used to go to things like The Office) and when it changed there was always a discussion about priorities. We did the same thing with items to do in a cycle. To date, this has been the best tools I have used to get work done in a small company.

The problem with task managers etc is that they put focus on the items, not on what value you want to create. Everyone gets focused on the individual work items and forgets about what it is that we bring of user value this cycle. The outcomes of each cycle becomes less important than completing the things we thought was a good idea when the cycle started.

3️⃣ Letting the engineers decide on their own

Three cubs on a mommy bear over a text box which says “solving imaginary scaling issues, at scale”

From https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev

You know what is going to happen when you let some engineers have free reign and build The Greatest Technology Platform Ever™ to propel your startup into the stratosphere. They will prematurely create something they think resemble what their idols do. It will be Planet Scale from day 4 for all of the companies 4 customers and 1 concurrent user. I would not say that this is a big exaggeration, I have seen it happen on many occasions. The enthusiasm to finally be able to architect the system they’ve envisioned all this time. To finally put into practice all the blog posts that they have read, all without really paying much attention to what the company actually needs in the beginning.

You should never let the engineers decide all things on their own, they need to articulate how it relates to where the business is right now and the next three months. There is no need for planet scale if you’re shut down in two months because you’re failing to get users. Opting for a serious cloud provider because “it will enable us to scale easily later” might be a decision which prevents you from shipping what you need right now and eventually kill the company.

Engineers should be allowed to choose many things, but they should not be doing it in a vacuum without close collaboration with everyone else. Prematurely architecting something complex has prevented companies from getting the chance to succeed more than on one occasion.

What should young companies do?

[Woman setting with her back towards you with her back turend, watching beautiful sunset.

Photo by Sage Friedman on Unsplash

Take a deep breath, hold it for ten seconds and then exhale. Relax, put your shoulders down and instead try to enjoy what is the best time of a companies life. Rather than rushing into becoming a proper company, you should embrace the competitive advantage you have of not being such a company. The small size, lack of processes and hacky technology is the secret sauce unicorns are made of. They are not made up of practices from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. If investors want structure, make a power point. Don’t mess up what potentially could be the best time!