Another Wednesday, another post in the series “After the Funding“. While previous posts have looked at strategy, sales, roadmap and releases, I will today look at people. At the end of the day it’s people that make or break startups. And you need to have the right team on board to succesfully unlock growth.

Build a Team that is Smart and Gets Things Done

The early team is built up of founders and a close circle of trusted employees that have often worked together previously and that become close friends. The team has natural chemistry and complementing skills. You need few management skills and early employees wear many hats, filling in as office manager or accountant when needed.

To expand the business, the team needs to be expanded. Expansion means bringing in seniority as well as volume. The team of founders and early employees needs to determine which management roles can be assumed by the current team and which need to be brought in from the outside. And the founders need to create a recruitment process that consistently lands the startup additional talent.

The founders must realize that it is time to bring in the professionals when they are spending more time learning than leading and the staff starts losing confidence. At the same time, they must avoid bringing in too much senior staff with high salaries and low hunger for success. As for expanding the team, the key lies in hiring people that are smart and that get things done. Read and apply Joel Spolky’s “Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing” and never hire someone if there are any doubts or you are having a hard time make a “hire or no hire” decision.

After the Funding

In the first post of the series I explained that decision-making needs to be based on long-term strategy. Owners need to spend time defining a clear and concise strategy and enable others to make day-to-day decisions based on their roles in the company.

Then I cautioned about the risks of premature expansion of the sales force. Owners must set-up a repeatable sales process first and then expand the sales force.

Then followed a post about the importance of a product roadmap to create alignment between teams, to help business define its target market and to guide technology in setting priorities and allocating resources.

And last week I made the case for your product heartbeat – a continual rapid-fire release plan that provides customers with new features at short, predictable intervals and gives focus to the development team.

Interesting Reads

Here are some interesting articles and posts on hiring:

• Next to his guerilla guide to interviewing, Joel has pubslished many interesting articles on hiring and other topics related to software development. The entire archive is worth reading!
• Another great blog is onstartups that I have referenced before. You might be interested why “your startup should not hire Seth Godin” or “how to tell schmucks from superstars in five minutes“
• The business of software blog has an amusing anecdote about the issues around hiring managers“.

Welcome back to “After the Funding“, the series about key management challenges for startups that have secured funding and now must focus their energy on flawless execution.

Today I will talk about the importance of a product roadmap to create alignment between expanding departments.

Align Business and Technology around a Product Roadmap

Business and technology align easily for early startups. The team is small; business and technology work side by side, often in the same office. There is no standard product to sell and no history of successfully closed deals, so business will want to discuss every deal with technology. And the number of prospects and customers is low so technology will value being involved with many of them to get necessary feedback. All in all, communication lines are direct, there are few opportunities and commitments and hence few challenges to maintain alignment.

As business grows, the sales force will start focusing on volume and there will be pressure to go after prospects that fit the product value proposition poorly. This is especially true when expanding geographically or selling indirectly through partners and resellers. And as technology advances, there will be less and less tacit market knowledge within the expanding development team. Communication will get more complex as more specialized roles such as marketing, support and consulting are created. From now on the company needs to work hard at maintaining focus and avoiding becoming a disoriented “jack of all trades, master of none”.

You will need to introduce a product roadmap to align business and technology. The roadmap will map out product direction over the following six to twelve months. It will help business defining its target market and get an early start at pitching future products and features. It will provide guidance to technology in setting priorities and allocating resources. The roadmap will assure consistent communication which is essential for survival as Steve Johnson explains convincingly by comparing it to NASA’s Capsule Communicator (CAPCOM), the single communication agent between space shuttle and mission control.

After the Funding

In the first post of the series I explained that decision-making needs to be based on long-term strategy. In a rapidly growing company, the owners need to spend time defining a clear and concise strategy while day-to-day decision making shifts to others based on their roles in the company.

And last week I cautioned about the risks of premature expansion of the sales force. Owners must set-up a repeatable sales process first and then expand the sales force.

Next week I will turn to release planning and explain how heartbeat release schedules improve productivity.

More on Product Roadmaps

Here are two good pointers to learn more about product roadmaps:

• The Pragmatic Marketing site with its hundreds of relevant articles is a good starting point. You can also follow their blog, sign up for webinars or subscribe to their newsletter.
• Or read about perspectives on the technical and commercial aspects of software at “Business of Software” – a conference cum blog like TheNextWeb. The conference features Joel Spolsky who I will write about in a future post about creating teams.