Creating, Refining, and Executing
When building a startup, you create “stuff” that gets refined and becomes the playbook the team executes.
When I say creating “stuff,” I mean all kinds of “stuff,” including fundraising documents, software, physical devices, service offerings, policies, chemical formulations, sensors, new materials, tools, training materials, marketing collateral, and more. That “stuff” becomes the product you plan to offer to the market; the enabling business infrastructure including financial and HR systems, manufacturing processes, quality systems, legal structures, collaboration and communication platforms and materials, business processes and procedures; and the marketing, labeling, customer training and other “wrapper” materials to promote and sell your innovative product into the marketspace successfully.
While there are patterns and models that can sometimes be followed, the details of all of this are created and customized to the specifics of each startup business. Therein lies one of the great challenges faced by startup founders. A great deal of startup-specific “content creation” is required to build out all the elements that will make up this unique startup – and content generation is not easy. It is especially not easy at the inception points where you identify that something is needed, and now you are faced with the problem of often a blank sheet of paper (or a blank document on a computer screen – work with me here!) staring a challenge in your face. Where to begin? How do you gather all the context and information you have about the topic at hand, begin to organize it into the shape of what you need, and invent whatever is missing? Once you have done a first draft, you can start to refine it based on feedback from others until it will do the job you need done. This de novo content generation is a skill that few people have. It requires defining a new thing out of nothing in the white space, seeing what needs to be there, and creating from scratch. In my experience, raw, from-scratch authoring requires tremendous creativity and synthesis, making it quite challenging to do well, so you must hunt carefully for those with these skills to form the nucleus of your team.
Easier to find are those that can take that initial straw person draft and improve it. These are the “editors” who can make the initial author’s work better. These individuals are often great partners and complements to the creators – and can extend the initial author’s work, build off of models to make variations, clarify the communications, review the designs, and do any other refinement stokes to make the initial work much better.
Finally, there is the execution layer – those “executors” who can take the plans and designs created by the “authors,” refined by the “editors,” and make it so consistently and repeatedly by dint of their skills, energy, personality, and perseverance. Successfully building a startup through its stages means finding the right mix of these different skill sets and talents for each phase of work as the startup evolves.
Manufacturing Illustration
Applying these types to a startup manufacturing process, the “author” work will often be done by the engineer who designs the manufacturing process for the new product. They may be able to leverage their knowledge of how to build other similar products. Still, they will need to identify what general principles can be applied to this specific circumstance, actually invent the process, and prove it out.
Likely the refinements and “editing” will be done by a production manager who will refine the manufacturing process, define the detailed procedures, and see it implemented and continuously improved.
And ultimately, the manufacturing technicians will fill out the team and hopefully execute the manufacturing process repeatedly and consistently so that quality, cost, and other objectives can be achieved.
Customer Success Illustration
Standing up a customer success organization means defining the roles and responsibilities of the team members and the support model and developing the playbook, frequently asked questions, required communication systems, and implementation plan. This requires a vision and the ability to translate that vision into concrete and customized deliverables to build the capability. Often this is the responsibility of a senior team leader who has done something similar before or a co-founder who will have to learn and figure it out successfully.
A strong customer success manager will translate that vision into the details embodied in the customer success tools, processes, and team. As the manager translates the vision into reality, they will make incremental refinements all along the way.
And ultimately, customer success representatives will execute the plans superbly and consistently. The best will be smart, empathetic problem-solvers who can follow the playbook effectively.
In the early stages, startups focus on “building,” which usually means creating something out of nothing. By its very nature, innovation means inventing and embodying new ideas, figuring out how to tell the story, listening, and learning. Some people can do this creative work – and when considering possibly co-founders and early hires, it is crucial to assess the capability of potential team members to contribute this essential “author” work across the many functional areas that must be covered. Asking for examples of their own original work, using a performance test that calls for generating work from scratch, and checking with references are all ways to identify and validate the presence of these relatively rare skills.
When recruiting “editors,” it is essential to achieve the right balance. “Authors” and “editors” are complementary, and you will likely need a healthy mix of both across key functional areas. Finally, as the playbooks are defined, you will want to hire those who will excel at execution and be happy contributors at delivering consistent performance repeatedly.
Pay attention when hiring to what stage you are at and what mix of authors, editors, and executors you need for the current and next phase of building your startup.
