[9/10] How to run a growth team at a startup?
Best practices of team alignment, business reviews, daily huddles
This is 9th, and the penultimate, essay of the Firestarter series. Before getting on with the post, a couple of points on some new things at Skilletal.
The first growth skills assessment practice test went live last week. 100+ folks have registered for it and ~20 people have taken the test so far. Learn more about the skill test here, or take the test here.
Apart from content on specific growth skills on Tuesdays, and skill tests on Fridays, I am also starting online Q&A sessions on specific growth questions on weekends. This Saturday, I’ll be taking up the questions I’ve received about the 1st skill test, as well as some of the questions I have received from ~20 people who have registered for it so far. Interested? Register for it here.
The previous essay sought to answer the question of how to build a growth team at a startup. This essay will seek to answer the question of how to run the team once it has been put together.
There are three key aspects of running a growth team that I’ll focus on, in this post:
Building alignment on the goals and the tasks,
Reviewing progress against the goals, and
Tracking progress against the tasks.
Building alignment on the goals and the tasks
In the previous essay, the key point I tried to make at the start was that thinking through what the key growth wins should be, and which channels or levers they are likely to come from, to help determine the type of skill sets a team should be hiring for. And so, the planning part not only comes first chronologically but is also crucial to the success of the team building process.
Similarly, once the team has been hired, getting the intellectual buy-in of the team around the goals and the projects to achieve the goals becomes the first step to running the team effectively. Let me explain.
Essays 1 and 2 dove into the building of a growth model and a growth roadmap. But before taking the growth roadmap to the team – that is the levers/projects/tasks that the team or the individual will be working on – we have to start at the why. That is to say, we can set a goal of increasing active users from x to y, and list the tasks that are going to achieve those goals. But that only addresses the what. And that cannot be the starting point for building a common ground. In fact, it comes last in the sequence depicted by Simon Sinek’s golden circle: with the ‘why’ being at the center (and the point to start), the ‘how’ being the middle circle, and the ‘what’ as the outermost one.
For example, at Meesho, during its social commerce phase, the specific ‘why’ for the company to exist was around enabling homepreneurs. And the specific ‘how’ for achieving it was by making a variety of digital catalogs accessible to the homepreneurs which they could sell over social media. Once there was an understanding in the team (or for a new team member) around the why and the how, the ‘what’ became easier to arrive at. Increase the number of digital catalogs by x%, decrease the average price of catalogs by y%, increase the number of homepreneurs by z%, build better integrations with social media formats, and so on.
The ‘why’ gives a larger purpose to the ‘how’, driving emotional buy-in. And, the congruence between the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ drives intellectual buy-in. Without this process, the ‘what’ seems to be arbitrarily plucked out of nowhere and leaves room for emotional or intellectual dissonance down the line.
Should there be alignment on just goals or on the tasks too?
Essay 2 drove the distinction between input levers and output metrics. The goals (or the ‘what’) are output metrics. Increasing customer satisfaction score by 10 basis points, or reducing marketing costs by 10%, are examples of typical goals. However, they are output metrics because working on the right levers achieves these as an outcome but are not something that people work on as tasks.
So far, we have talked about building alignment on the ‘why’ (vision and mission), the ‘how’ (the business model or strategy), and the ‘what’ (goals). But should there be an alignment on the roadmap and tasks too? Or is getting team’s buy-in beforehand required only for the bigger questions and not for specific tasks?
The first 4 parts of vision->mission->strategy->goal->roadmap->task combination are necessarily driven top-down. For example, the founders will decide on the vision, the mission, the strategy, and the goals. The leadership team is expected to contribute to the strategy and the goals, but their primary job is to connect the goals with the roadmap and the tasks (the subject of essay # 7).
Now, the roadmap and the tasks might be driven top-down from the growth lead to the team in the early stages of a startup. However, over time, the team will begin to come up with ideas for the roadmap and the tasks too. And the stage of maturity the team is in determines the requirement of alignment on tasks.
That is to say: If the levers have been arrived at through a bottom-up process by the team, there is an inherent intellectual buy-in from the team around the levers. However, if the levers have been decided top-down and are being handed over to the team, just like the ‘why’, the ‘how’ and the ‘what’, the rationale behind the tasks needs to be explained and intellectual buy-in has to be sought at the start.
How often can we change the goals and the tasks?
By definition, the vision and the mission are least susceptible to change over a short period of time. The strategy and the goals change more often, in comparison. While the roadmap and the tasks, by definition, need to be revised periodically.
However, deciding on the roadmap itself takes time, and every new task needs some activation time to get it off the ground. So, if the team is always planning, or is always changing the plans, it won’t make any long-term progress. At the same time, if the team does not periodically assess whether the tasks that they are working on are indeed helping achieve the goals, then the chances of covering a lot of ground but not in direction of the goal also increases.
It then makes for a classic optimization problem: if you decide on a certain vision, mission, strategy, goals, and roadmap combination and don’t ever change it, it makes for great alignment between the team members but minimizes chances of course-correction to a superior strategy, goals, and roadmap. On the other hand, if you keep chopping and changing the goals, the roadmap, and the tasks, then perhaps you’ll keep finding the perfect task at every step to get closer to the goal. But it is more likely that the alignment on the goals and the tasks in the team will be very low, which in turn will reduce the chances of achieving the goals and successful execution of the tasks.
To strike a balance between building alignment and breeding complacency with status quo, there needs to be a predefined horizon for the current version of goals and roadmap and a predefined window when next horizon’s goals and roadmap will be up for discussion. Too short a horizon and there isn’t enough time to build alignment and make most of the alignment. And too long a horizon and not enough chance to introduce new ideas.
The traditional horizon for growth planning is often a quarter (i.e. 3 months or 13 weeks). Which breaks down into: a week or two that goes in deciding and building alignment on the plan, a big part of the quarter – say 10 weeks – going into executing on the plan (along with regular reviews – topic of next section), and eventually a week or two goes in measuring the progress, feeding into the next cycle of revisiting the goals and roadmap.
Wait, how exactly do we build alignment?
It’s about clear and repeated communication. Every time a new member joins the team, the vision, mission, and strategy have to be spelled out explicitly. Once the goals and roadmap have been decided, all reviews and all common forums within the team should start from there. As the Jeff Weiner quote goes: “When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.”
Goal Reviews
While reviewing progress against goals and that against tasks might look one and the same, there is a crucial difference. Let’s first understand the difference between them, before moving to the best practices of goal reviews.
Goal reviews (such as weekly/monthly business reviews or department reviews) involve tracking progress against output metrics. Task reviews (such as daily huddles or stand-up meetings, project-specific reviews) track progress against the inputs.
For example, let’s say one of the growth goals at a marketplace is to increase the number of customers by 30% in the coming quarter. For this goal, one of the levers in the roadmap is to double the number of influencer partnerships. A goal review will then start at the goal (number of customers), rather than the task (number of partnerships), and first see whether the goal is on track to be achieved or not. If it is, the review can further cascade down the hierarchy of metrics to the next level of metrics. If it isn’t, the review can then move to the root cause analysis. On the other hand, task or project progress reviews focus exclusively on the input tasks. In the above example, it would be about whether the team is on track to double the number of influencer partnerships or not, without worrying about the outcome of the partnerships.
The success of a goal review is then about:
Did the attendees efficiently understand the progress against the goals?
Did the attendees efficiently understand the root cause in case of under-achievement against the goals, and infer the required course-correction of tasks?
Both of these flow from how well the goals were selected in the first place. While this topic is covered in essay # 3 on setting up a growth measurement system, three best practices are worth noting:
Ensuring the top goals are level-1 metrics. A miss on any of these leads to unintended second order effects. For example, putting installs as the top goal instead of level-3 metric in the metric hierarchy leading to revenue at level-1, might lead to installs increasing without proportional impact on revenue.
Top goals at a business level should be satisfy the MECE principle. And at every level, they should be complementary covering both the volume and quality aspects. For example, a social media team with follower count as a volume goal, should have a complementary goal on the quality aspects such as relevance (% of followers from ideal customer persona) and engagement.
Metric hierarchy from level-1 metric to level-2 independent metrics to level-3 input metrics and business drivers should be clear to the team. This would lead to faster root cause identification and course corrections.
Inversely, when the goals and associated metric hierarchy are selected without thinking through, and then chopped and changed too often, it leads to goal reviews changing too often to be successful.
Another common pitfall is when the review format itself is tinkered with too often to make it better, might end up requiring some time and effort from attendees every time to understand the new format, thus paradoxically coming in the way of a successful review. Just like goals and roadmaps, reviews too can have a fixed format for a horizon, and changes (if required) can be batched together during a predefined time window.
Task Reviews
Now, it might seem that goal reviews, by virtue of tracking the outcomes, indirectly review the input projects and tasks. And therefore the task reviews can be done away with. But here are 3 purposes that task reviews serve that goal reviews do not:
The first is that goal reviews are a higher level of abstraction while tasks are at lower levels. For example, a CEO might conduct an overall business review, without going into progress of all tasks across the company. Or a growth lead might conduct a growth review, without getting into details of all growth tasks. Task reviews – such as project progress catch-up or daily stands up meetings or huddles – provide a bottom-up view of progress, instead of a top-down view.
The second purpose is that tasks provide a view of the leading indicators. For example, the goals and metrics might be on track at the moment, due to past work, but a lag in task completion today will reflect in the goal review only in the future. This becomes even more important when there are projects with long incubation periods, or when progress is measurable only in terms or input work or input metrics rather than in terms of outcome. Content marketing projects or engineering as marketing projects are relevant examples.
The third purpose is that tasks often run into blockers, either because of dependencies or conflicting priorities between different tasks, and require quick prioritization. These decisions cannot wait for goal reviews – which are often at weekly or monthly intervals.
Since task reviews are required to be more frequent, they should not take up too much of the attendees’ time. Regular huddles and stand up meetings should not need more than a few minutes of preparation time from the attendees either. Goal reviews, on the other hand, should require more preparation before the meeting, and should go in-depth during the meeting.
Summary
The opening of Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina goes: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Similarly, if you look at unhappy teams, you will find they are unhappy for a multitude of reasons, and have differing solutions within the team on how to fix it. And when you look at happy teams, at the very least, they have clarity of what is the larger purpose of what they do and how their specific tasks connect back to that purpose.
This essay dove into how to build that kind of alignment, and how to track it.
Start the alignment building with the team (or a new member in the team) around the ‘why’ (vision and mission) and ‘how’ (strategy). Only then progress to the ‘what’ (goals). Getting the team's buy-in towards them ensures everyone is on common intellectual ground.
Beyond this, introduce the right frameworks, set the guardrails, seed the plausible ideas, but let the team come up with the roadmap and tasks to achieve the ‘what’. If the team in its current state is not equipped to do that, it can be driven top-down. But, in the latter case, further buy-in needs to be had on the roadmap and tasks too.
Declare the windows for planning and execution beforehand. Resist the temptation to jump to the latest project idea as it undermines the process of building alignment and causes long-term damage. Don’t coast on the same roadmap and projects for too long either, as it reduces the chances of bringing in better ideas.
Good goal setting and clear metric hierarchy ensures good goal/business reviews. Reviews are not about fancy formats but about efficiently communicating the progress against the goals, and the root cause and course correction required in case of a divergence.
Task reviews enable abstraction across the organization, provide leading indicators, and catch blockers in time. However, frequent task reviews take away precious execution time.
In the next essay — the last essay of this series — we will dive into managing individuals.
If you have any suggestions on this article, or need any clarifications, I am reachable at sudhanshu@skilletal.com
Are you available for consulting early stage startups?