Download - How to build great teams

H O W T O B U I L D G R E AT T E A M S

J E F F H AY N I E @ J H AY N I E

F I V E I M P O R TA N T S T E P SM Y H U M B L E A D V I C E …

who am i?

💰 serial tech entrepreneur living in silicon valley having

started 4 venture capital backed startups

🚀 angel investor in numerous startups

💀 writing software for 30 years

💩 i’ve failed way more than i’ve succeeded at this

S T E P 1

Communicate often and early


✓ Have a strategic message that gets repeated to the entire company often

✓ What’s our purpose?

✓ Why does it matter?

✓ What’s the long term opportunity?

✓ What are we doing in the immediate term to get there?


✓ Provide more detail and specificity as you communicate down in the organization

✓ What’s our role to play in the bigger picture?

✓ How are we going to accomplish our part?

✓ Why what we’re doing matters?

✓ What and when do we we need to accomplish in the near term?


✓ Provide various types of communication appropriate for different mediums

✓ People consume content differently

✓ Helps reinforce the bigger picture message

✓ Slack is great for instant consumption, not perfect for strategic messaging

✓ If unsure, do it verbally and reinforce with a written follow-up


✓ Get out any bad or unpleasant news as quickly as possible

✓ Your culture knows before you think they do

✓ Treat everyone like adults and with respect

✓ Give them context along with facts

✓ Be honest and direct

S T E P 2

Empower your team to solve important problems


✓ With a well understand strategic plan, your team can be empowered to solve real problems

✓ Give them the space to “find solutions” that can be solved

✓ Easy to direct work, harder to allow solutions to be found to real problems … but that’s the point

✓ Focus on how you “measure success” — usually the how doesn’t matter as much


✓ “what and how” changes, but “why” usually doesn’t:

✓ The bigger picture matters … “why are we trying to achieve what we’re working on?”

✓ I usually provide a “and then if we achieve this, here’s what is likely to happen”. If-then logic can help:

✓ “if we are able to get these 3 important features done, it will unlock the ability to sell our solution into the public sector. by doing that, it will expand our market opportunity by 3-fold”


✓ Important problems have well-defined success metrics:

✓ Try and provide tangible metrics that everyone can understand:

✓ “If we are able to build out the features necessary to unlock the public sector, we believe it represents a new ACV of at least $5M next year which would put us over our target by 35%”

✓ Business changes, so make sure you communicate progress (good or bad)


✓ Create culture that celebrates success and acknowledges failures:

✓ Make sure you take time to celebrate wins, even if minor

✓ If you’re not failing, you’re not taking enough risks and playing it too safe:

✓ Make sure you acknowledge things you’ll do better or improve upon next time

✓ You can’t “hit the ball if you don’t take a swing” - set a tone for the culture that “you’re going to miss more than you hit, but you only have to hit 1/3 to make it to the Baseball Hall of Fame”

S T E P 3

Measure, Iterate and Improve


✓ One of my favorite mantras and core values.

✓ Startups are uniquely positioned to do the impossible because:

✓ Typically don’t have their own legacy to protect

✓ Can move fast

✓ Feedback cycles can be short and iterative

✓ Take advantage of your ability to change and course correct fast


✓ On measuring things:

✓ Pick a few number of well understood metrics

✓ If you’re at 100% on your metrics (and I don’t mean uptime or SLA!), you’re either (a) picking the wrong things to measure or (b) you have a “place it safe” culture

✓ Target ~75-80% achievement. Realize you’re it’s more important to course correct and miss, than to hit it and sail in the wrong direction


✓ On iteration:

✓ You should start small and iterate.

✓ In engineering we call this “don’t prematurely optimize”. In business, don’t execute something:

✓ The biggest killer of most startups is premature scaling (spend more money, hire the wrong people, go after the wrong market, etc).

✓ Do something small and unsatisfying and if it works, you’ll know what you need to do next …


✓ On improving:

✓ Acknowledge that there will be a better way and find time in your planning to refactor

✓ STOP doing things that don’t work or are suboptimal !! It’s OK. You don’t need to create legacy.

✓ Only optimize once you’ve “figured it out”. Do things initially that aren’t scalable

S T E P 4

Facilitate collaboration in memorable ways


✓ Slack is great, but …..

✓ Try and create memorable experiences as part of the journey which will help create strong bonds between team mates

✓ I really like team off-sites and “planning weeks”

✓ Try and cultivate unusual connections between people in different groups (sales + engineering, marketing + finance, etc)


✓ People always tell stories about favorite events:

✓ During tough times (which you will have), people will remember bonds built at different events

✓ Helps lubricate stronger working relationships especially team-to-team when people have bonded outside of normal day-to-day

✓ Doesn’t have to be expensive or glamorous. Some of the best events we had were Boche ball during engineering week


✓ Culture is intentional, but needs to be genuine:

✓ Different cultures have different norms, different things that work or don’t so be sensitive to that.

✓ Create intentional activities that the company as a whole rallies around and be consistent in planning and execution.

✓ people will tell stories like: “remember at the last planning week where Chris and Tony refactored the entire CLI one evening?”

✓ Be mindful of professionalism (try and limit the “party at any expense” culture) around events and communicate it.


✓ Try and treat remote teams and local teams (as best you can) the same:

✓ Timezone differences are very hard to accommodate all. Be mindful of global events that force other timezones to stay up late or get up early. Do some activities at HQ at an unusual timezone to accommodate another geo and be intentional about it.

✓ If you have free snacks and unlimited drink options at HQ, make sure you have the same in your remote locations.

✓ Make sure your remote employees visit HQ at least once per year and spend quality time with people outside their normal day-to-day team.

S T E P 5

Make it all about the People


✓ At a certain scale, be intentional with how you execute:

✓ What works when you’re 10 people in one room, doesn’t work at 100 people in different locations. Recognize that and be intentional around execution

✓ Assumptions don’t scale

✓ You can still keep that startup culture as you scale, but it goes from being organic to systematic


✓ As you scale, you’ll bring in a lot of people that are designed to remove risk from the organization:

✓ Accounting, HR, Security, Legal, etc. — all wonderful and important roles to play, but designed to remove risk (and thus can be seen to stunt speed)

✓ Incentives matter. Make sure you’re thoughtful about how people are compensated, how they are rewarded and what their mission is. People are good at maximizing reward


✓ In the end, all of this is ultimately about the people:

✓ Your culture is way more in tune with how things are vs. how you want them to be

✓ Companies are made up of people from all walks of life (hopefully!) and different experiences to draw from … make that your differentiator

✓ Create a culture where people treat each other like they want to be treated. It starts at the top.

Let’s Review

Communicate early and often





Download - How to build great teams

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