Watch out startups while scaling up your operations!

When a startup is in an initial bootstrap phase, the founders and the team is passionate about converting their great ideas in a cool product or a technology.? The initial goal is to quickly convert those ideas into a quick prototype so that startup can prove the concept, beat the competition and potentially take it to the investors to get the funding. The next phase would be to refine and improve that prototype, cleanup those bugs and remove the hacks to take it to the next level - customer and stakeholders.? This phase is very important to get the product validated and get a key input from the potential customers. During these two phases, the team is focused on creating something new and innovative very fast to beat the competition.? In these phases it is possible that the startup didn't focus that much on a process or documentation.? Everyone in the team helps with everything.? Everyone has the same goal in mind to get that initial prototype out, get the positive feedback and customer commitment and launch the startup to the next growth phase.

The real fun starts when it is a time to take that initial product to the productization and scale up the operations and execution to drive that next level of growth. I feel that (and I might be wrong) sometimes the techie founders fail to take right steps as they scale up their operations and grow their team.?These are some important points that not just startups but any company should keep in mind as they scale-up.

1. Clear Vision and Strategy:? It is extremely important to have a well-defined Vision and a Strategy that leaders can explain to their team in simple words. It is important to have a clear communication with the team and possibly buy-in for the vision and strategy from the members at all levels (not just leaders) for a smooth execution.? It is also important to have the clarity of the Vision and Strategy when you are trying to attract top talent to accelerate the growth.
2. Corporate Culture: As the startup comes out of infancy into a growth mode,? it is very important to have a clarity on the culture of the company.? It is important to keep this cultural fit in to mind when hiring engineers as well as leaders.? You want to make sure that you have an open, inclusive, collaborative and politics free environment to be able to provide healthy work environment to drive high productivity and teamwork. Foster the culture where senior engineers and architects don't have ego and they are willing to help junior engineers to grow.? At the same time, it's important to make sure that junior engineers are open to learn and are not afraid of asking questions or help.? Setting up a right culture upfront in my opinion is as important as having right technology as you grow the organization.? Leaders need to lead by example. Even everyone is extremely busy, those 1:1s, staff meetings are still important to keep healthy work environment and open communication.
3. ?Trust:??It is extremely important to have leaders learn to trust their team and at the same time gain team's trust to execute for the next phase of growth.? Connecting with engineering team at all levels is very important for the cross-functional execution and teamwork.? If there is any priority shift along the way, engineers will believe the leaders and go with the shift if they trust the management.
4. ?Empowerment and Accountability:?It is very common to have founders and leaders contribute to the product development or coding in the startup.? Apart from product definition and requirements, architecture and design they can continue helping the team with product development but as the leaders grow the team, they need to learn to trust the team to execute.? They need to learn to empower the team to make decisions but at the same time make them accountable to deliver results. This way the founder or executives can free up their time to drive the business growth by spending more time with customers, marketing and product team. Foster the culture of innovation and risk taking.? Sometimes it's ok to take risk and fail.
5. Process:?In the initial phase of a startup, usually there is no well-defined process. As you ramp up the team and hire more engineers and look at a predictable delivery of the roadmap, it is very important to define the process w.r.t overall Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDLC). There are so many areas like - Tools, Project Management, Roadmap and release planning, Code?Development methodology, Cross-functional code/product integration, Test and Solution validation, KPIs and monitoring the progress, Customer engagement and Customer support, DevOps Automation, Continuous Integration and deployment that require well thought strategy.
6. Focus on Quality:?It is very important to focus on quality from beginning. Sometimes when you are trying to get the foot in the door, it is possible that you need to strike a right balance between feature velocity, quality and time-to-market.? As your product reaches some maturity and moves from labs into the production, you need to increase the focus on quality, scale and performance. Having a right quality up front can help with overall customer satisfaction, retention and growth.
7. Automation:?It is extremely important to focus on an automation from beginning as you scale up to optimize the time and resources. You want to leverage on those sanity and regressions scripts release over release to keep up with the quality. As you integrate the code, it is very important to have some safeguards to provide protection against breakages. Having a good automation framework and coverage can also help with a turn-around-time when you need to quickly respond to a customer issue.?
8. Hiring:?It is very important to hire a right set of leaders and engineers and trust me, I know it is not that easy? sometimes when you need to grow fast and not enough good quality candidates.? I believe that more effort you put upfront with hiring right candidates with a good cultural fit, it will pay off at the end.
9. Mentor and Onboarding Process:?As you expand your team strength, it is important to have a well-defined onboarding process to bring the new-hire up to speed much faster.? If you can assign a mentor to each new-hire, the ramp-up will be faster and smoother.
10. Documentation:?Sometimes documentation of Product requirements, Architecture, Functional Spec, Design Spec, QA test plan takes back burner when you have resource and time crunch.? I strongly believe that having some form of documentation and formal reviews and checkpoints can help iron out some of the issues earlier.? Documentation can make sure everyone is on the same page and there is no confusion. Also, documentation can help you with the ramp up of the new team members.

As you scale up your operations, it is extremely important to focus on these key points to create more collaborative, open and inclusive environment.? Continuously drive innovation and growth and create good quality products and of course keep the customers happy!