High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups From 10 to 10,000 People

by Elad Gil

There is a balance between focusing too much on either the short term or the long term. The key to me is having two documents. The first—at Stripe, we’re calling them charters—articulates the long-term view of why this team or this product or this company exists, what its overarching strategy is, and what success would look like over even a three-to-five-year period. And then the second is a shorter-term plan: “Okay, in the near term, then, what are we trying to get done?” That can look like a results-based management model or an OKR—objectives and key results—model. But it’s some way that a team can say, “This is where we’re going long term. And on a quarterly basis, this is where we’re focusing. We’re hoping to move X and Y metrics.” If you’re working on an early-stage product, even within a company that has a more mature product, that shorter-term plan looks different. You probably don’t know what X and Y metrics are yet. You’re still in the milestone mode. Any planning process needs to accommodate product life cycle, if you will. You want to establish buckets that the company understands to capture each of the product stages you have. At every stage, though, you want to find a balance between that long-term charter (“Why do we exist?”) and the short-term plan (“What are we going to do?”).