Learnings of a scale-up pro (1): the non-obvious tool to build your startup like a formula one team ??

After leading expansion in Latin America at Uber, then globally at WeWork, and coaching 30+ among the top 1% performing startups, I could define myself a veteran when it comes to navigating hypergrowth.

When a new coaching client, typically a startup founder or exec, tells me about their strategy, I always start with the same question : “Does your playbook reflect this?”. If you ask me about the most useful tool to guide the scale-up phase, the one I’d swear by, my answer is doubtless: it’s your playbook.

In this series of posts, I’ll share what I have learned in my hypergrowth journey so far, diving deep into the mechanics and mindset surrounding some of the world’s most successful companies’ growth playbooks.

If you want to learn how to scale-up like a?pro, read on.

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In this post, I take an approach that is first conceptual, and then practical. First, I’ll explain the most important concepts and how to recognize if you applied them correctly. Then, I’ll provide you with a practical guide to put those learnings in practice in the immediate future.

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A strong playbook is about 3 things: execution, execution, and execution

I recently read?Good Strategy, Bad Strategy?by Richard Rumelt, probably one of the most influential thinkers on strategy and management. For him, good strategy is broken down into 3 steps:

• diagnosis,
• guiding policy, and
• coherent action.

Once the management has decided what the guiding policy is, the playbook is the tool that codifies it and guides coherent action for the entire company.?The playbook collects it all in an organized and accessible way for everyone.

Growing at a rate north of 50% year on year is hard work, and a growth playbook will empower you to manage execution, create transparency and standardise communication to reach your goal.

If you’re a founder asking yourself, “When should I start building my playbook?”, it means you’re late and you should have started already.

So what is a playbook?

A Playbook is the ensemble of all the tools that guide your company execution towards its goal

So, it’s not one specific spreadsheet, or checklist (I am shocked at how many companies think that playbook = Asana checklist). Execution means:

• Navigating?(i.e. the actions your teams undertake towards the goal)
• Coordinating?(i.e. the many ways the teams interact with each other, directly or indirectly)
• Anticipating?(i.e. the ability to predict specific issues, bottlenecks or problems, so they can be avoided or mitigated)

The playbook enables you to manage execution, by creating Russian dolls with company-level actions, department actions, team actions, and specific role actions.?Not only does it manage execution, but it standardized communication.?The playbook enables transparency across the entire organization, because everyone can see the status of a specific deliverable across all teams.

Playbook = the ensemble of all the tools that guide your company execution towards its goal.

When I think about the pitfalls I see when coaching and advising founders that are building playbooks, a common theme that emerges is ownership.?Teams often think their playbook belongs to the growth team (or marketing, or operations). I believe the effective approach is instead quite different. I encourage teams to think of it as a guide that encompasses execution across the whole company.

It should be like what DNA is for our body: it should contain the whole set of instructions to make this incredibly complex and sophisticated system work, in a language that is understandable by every single piece of the whole.

If you’re a startup, everybody is involved in growth. From the person who does the billing, to the performance marketer, to the CFO. Everybody is fighting for growth. If everyone thinks their responsibility is limited to their job description, you will have a culture that will hinder growth at every turn. When I join a new team, one of the first things we discuss is what responsibility and ownership means for each of the teams.

We want to empower responsibility beyond their job description. Responsibility is no longer limited to a specific role or department. It empowers everybody to observe, think, evaluate and come up with solutions.

Building a playbook is like tearing down the walls between offices and letting everyone work in an open space where they actually see each other’s work. It’s about radical transparency as well as everybody feeling part of the same team.

As a founder or executive, you make this happen by simply stating it clearly as an expectation for your team. This new definition of team responsibility removes the fear of the unknown and stimulates healthy conversations about what can be done better.

Thinking back on an example from my time leading international expansion at WeWork, it would be impossible for us to launch a new location if the construction team wasn’t coordinated with marketing and sales. Without a playbook the most absurd things would happen: an internet contract was missing when launching a new space (just because everyone involved may have thought someone else was taking care of that!), or air conditioning wasn’t yet set up for a launch in the middle of summer.

A playbook works only if everyone is involved

Think about a Formula 1 pit stop. It’s naive to think there’s someone that should be excluded. Everybody needs to perform incredibly precise tasks, in a very short period of time.?They either train all together, or they don’t perform at all.

The person on the team that is in least coordination with the others, the slowest, is actually the one that will determine the final speed. The team goes as fast as its slowest team member.

Many competitors in your industry are facing the same challenges as you. And the solution is simple. Start to perform the most important actions earlier. Build a playbook earlier. Create a stronger performance culture before them. And in order to do that, you need an execution tool. The playbook is the tool that will enable you to track, modulate and create all the adjustments and new rules of execution for your never-ending competitive landscape.

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Take Action???

The default in human psychology is to control things, and focus on one’s individual performance. It’s critical to fight this temptation and create a culture of support, openness and constructive feedback.

1. Design your organisational chart. Draw coloured lines between people or teams that need to collaborate closely.

• Does each team have transparency across the actions, decision-making processes, and needs of the other teams with whom they collaborate closely?

2. Define coordination practices.

• How do these teams and people ensure coordination?
• Do they hold regular meetings?
• Do they use shared documents?
• How effective and updated are these tools?

3. Create a strong collaboration chain across the organisation.

• You will see that all teams in the end are connected, as if they’re different links on a chain. Identify the weakest elements of the chain.
• These people are either staying on the sidelines out of choice, or because they’re actively marginalised by other teams.
• Empower these people to become active members of the chain.

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The dictionary for your common language is the playbook

I joined Uber when our expansion playbook had just over one hundred steps. one year later, those steps became a thousand+.

Scaling a business is complex, because there are many tasks associated with every piece of execution that need to happen in perfect coordination across teams. Compared to other systems that require coordination, such as machines, it’s even harder, because the people executing those tasks all have diverse perspectives, communication styles, skills and weaknesses.

Whilst some have just joined, others have been with the company since the very beginning. Some people love process, others not so much.?Put simply: there are cultural differences. If you want your company to work as a machine, you need to make sure everybody speaks a common language.

A strong playbook will enable a shared understanding in a way that is structured, focused and helps the company achieve its most critical milestones.

The beauty of it is that it is a methodical system that enables replication. To enable replication, you need standardisation. To enable standardisation, you need to create policies, organisation, structure, and have a deep understanding of what each team is expected to achieve, and how. In order to replicate success, you need to know the when, who, where and why of each action.

Credits

Very few startups know the answers to these questions. Maybe they think they do, but when during a coaching session we start asking, they get lost. This is what happens when a startup grows from 10 people to fifty without a playbook.

They might be attributing their poor performance to a lack of marketing, or to the product, or to some other external condition they can’t control, but it’s usually something much more deeply ingrained in their way of doing business: it’s their communication culture.

If your playbook is the party, your team is the host

In a playbook, there are elements that might be obvious to a long-time employee of a company, but appear confusing to someone new, or someone from a different team. It’s important to remember that each individual and each team is writing their section of the playbook for someone else.

It’s like throwing a party. When we throw a party, we do it for other people to enjoy, we don’t do it for ourselves.?For us, it’s mainly about the hours of preparation, cooking, buying the drinks, and tidying up afterwards. For our guests, it should be fun and that’s it. Make sure each team builds the playbook with this in mind. Consider the other teams in your business your guests. Everything should be easy to find: clear, detailed, and precise.

Outstanding playbooks are easy to spot, because everyone in the company counts on them.?They become the reference point that everybody uses to perform every action and to coordinate with other teams.?Before sending that email, before asking the head of the team about that task, on their first day of work when they are a bit lost… they just go to the playbook and find an answer that saves everybody time and is aligned with the goals.

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Take Action???

Become obsessed with precision, detail, and maximising the potential of the tools that you’re using.

1. Take random tasks from the playbook and analyse them in detail.

• Conduct this thought exercise: if a new hire joined tomorrow with no broader context of the company, would they be able to perform, just by using the playbook?
• Does each task have a deadline, a clear owner, a set of rules, a connected training, and a “how” to meet the task’s objective?
• Are the tasks organised like Russian dolls, where at each level you can zoom in or zoom out?

2. Do a pulse check on the playbook.

• Does everybody rely on the playbook or are there teams that trust it less than others?
• What can you do to bring everybody onboard? Can you foster a culture where compromise is the way to make everybody work together?

3. Hold regular quarterly meetings to review the playbook and improve it. All teams should participate. Each team will, in turn, review their own tasks and sections on a monthly basis.

• Are you automating as much as possible? When a decision maker needs something (e.g. a decision, a resource, an approval, etc.), is the process of getting them this resource automated or does it go through one or more humans?
• Keep reviewing your playbook to identify areas for improvement.

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I hope this initial dive into learning execution was useful for you. I invite you to let me know if there’s any topics or questions you’d like me to write about.

I help startups reach top 1% performance and scale-up from 1 to 10 by supporting them with execution, org design, and talent. If you’re interested to explore how we could work together, just DM me.