Process Versus Progress

At the organizational level, growth amounts to successfully steering through thousands of tiny transitions. You start with a small group of people who wear many different hats, and must evolve into a collection of teams that can both function independently and collaborate effectively. One of the trickiest aspects is the tradeoff between process and progress, as the organization changes and grows.?

Startups and other small companies are famously allergic to process, and with good reason. When your team is small, any unnecessary overhead can be deadly. As Donald Knuth famously said, “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” The original context was software development, but it applies equally well to other aspects of business, where pre-optimization often takes the form of excessive process. In short:?

Process (by itself) is not progress!??

However, there does come a time when being excessively anti-process will begin to harm your organization. Let’s look at some examples, starting with:?

Product Updates?

If you’re in the B2B space, this one is important to get right early — business customers expect a high degree of communication and dislike surprises. If your product integrates with other products, plays a critical role in customer business operations, or impacts your customers' customer experience (CX) in any way, your process for changing the product will face heavy scrutiny. But the trade-off of process versus progress still applies. If a young company invests in their product release processes too heavily at the expense of actually shipping product, it could spell their doom. Early on, the simplest way to address this is by ensuring every employee has a customer first mentality – keeping customers happy is everyone's job.?

That can work great for a while, until it doesn’t. If the company is successful and begins to grow, they will develop a need for more specialization, which also means coordination between the specialized roles. Product updates need to go smoothly, customer satisfaction depends on it. All customer facing teams need advance notice of what’s coming, and the tools to prepare the customers. The new changes and features need to be well documented. You may need demos and other training material. Sales needs enablement on the latest features – how they can benefit incoming leads and existing prospects. Marketing needs to weave the latest stuff into their collateral and activities. If you run beta or early access programs, there will be additional complexity there. The list goes on! This is a hard problem, and one we specialize in solving. For each area where well-defined coordination between roles or teams is needed, you can start with this outline of the high-level approach:?

1. Nominate or appoint a lead. This person is responsible for achieving the goals – not just creating a process.
2. Identify who should be involved and how, along with who should only be aware. Frameworks like RACI can be useful, just don’t go overboard – remember the mantra: process by itself is not progress.
3. Define your goals. Keep them simple, and aligned to beneficial outcomes. For example, ensuring sales clearly understands and can demonstrate the value of a new feature can help them win deals.
4. The lead's first job is to quickly deploy the leanest process possible, involving the least amount of change.
5. After the process has run for a while, the lead should go back and review the goals, together with the team from step 2, and see what adjustments need to be made. Take note: you’re not only adjusting the process here, but potentially the goals as well, based on what you've learned from prior iterations. Repeat this step as necessary.

You will be tempted to stop after step 4. Don't do it! A small amount of additional effort, while the proverbial cement is still wet, can yield big gains in efficiency that everyone will appreciate for years to come.

Resist the urge to buy a piece of software that promises to solve the problem, before you understand the details. Configuring, managing, onboarding everyone into the new tool can become its own goal. That process does not solve the problem – it’s not real progress. Better to start with a tool that everyone already understands, could be as simple as a dedicated Slack channel or a Google doc. Once the shape of the process is understood, it becomes much easier to trial software products, determine if they are a good fit, and get everyone onboarded.

Process gets a bad name because it can take on a life of its own. Organizations with other challenges are especially prone to hide their real problems beneath process, often paired with a dedicated software tool. Those approaches never end well, and many people have horror stories along these lines. Process PTSD should not prevent a healthy, growing company from leveraging planning & process judiciously, where it's needed. Even a struggling company can dig their way out by getting back to first principles, conducting honest, thorough analysis of the problems, and implementing plans to change. That too, is a process!?

The steps outlined here are only a starting point. The devil is always in the details, and each organization will experience different challenges along the way. Please comment below on how you’ve seen this done in the past, good or bad.?

If you need help working through a transition or challenge like the one described above, contact us today!??

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