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

by Elad Gil

7. Communicate directly and clearly, and compassionately. Don’t beat around the bush when doing the re-org. Explain in clear language what is happening and why. Listen to people’s feedback but be firm about the change. There will always be people who are unhappy with the shift in org structure. They may feel passed over for promotion or demoted, even if this is not the case. Listen carefully and see if you can meet their needs in the future. However, keep backtracking to a minimum. You are making this change for a reason, and if you start making exceptions for the squeakiest wheels you may reverse the whole reason you are making the change, as well as show people you are open to being politicked. Just like letting people go, a re-organization can be unpleasant. There will undoubtedly be people disappointed with their new role or diminished responsibilities. If done right however, your company will function more effectively and be aligned to win. Re-orgs have to occur for the long term success of the company.

When companies rapidly start scaling, I’ve observed the following things: First, everyone’s workload increases 2–5X. People are scrambling to plug the holes and end up doing a lot of different things. Second, you start hiring quickly. You think that’s going to solve things but your workload only increases. Because you are doing more not less with more people. You are taking on projects you could not get to. Third, as you onboard new people to fill out the organization and the org reaches some sort of equilibrium, your role and its scope suddenly becomes narrow. And I think this phase is really difficult for early employees especially, who acceded during the exponential growth phase. The people who deal with that—the people who deal with the role definition becoming narrower and more focused and are able to faithfully transition through that—are the ones that grow with the company.

Elad: One piece of advice I give employees at these types of companies is don’t sweat it too much. Because every six months, if your company’s doubling, it’s a different company. So if your peer is suddenly your manager, it’s possible in a year you’ll suddenly be their manager’s manager. So as long as you just keep your head down and do good work, things tend to work out. Because it’s growing so fast that if you joined early you tend to be in pretty good shape. Ruchi: I completely agree with that. Every six months, the company will grow and look completely different. Whatever systems and processes you’re putting in place, you have to be mentally prepared to change them. And all that time you invested in coming up with the perfect process, well, you are going to have to do it again.

Constantly emphasize values day-to-day. Repeat them until you are blue in the face. The second you are really sick of saying the same thing over and over, you will find people have started repeating it back to you.

Get rid of bad culture fits quickly. Fire bad culture fits even faster than you fire low performers.

How do you plan to screen for these values in your interviews? What questions do you plan to ask at each stage to surface candidates’ values? For example, if you are selecting for people who will dive in proactively to solve problems they identified outside of their own responsibilities, ask about past examples where they have done so in other jobs.

“If there is a doubt, there is no doubt”

Briefly speaking, I think there are five top responsibilities of a CEO: being the steward of and final arbiter of the senior management; being the chief strategist; being the primary external face for the company, at least in the early days; almost certainly being the chief product officer, although that can change when you’re bigger; and then taking responsibility and accountability for culture. And culture is so fundamental to what the company is that it’s truly problematic to delegate.

we know some companies that spend 90–100% of their outbound recruiting, their active sourcing efforts, focused only on candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. They know that their inbound is not diverse, and so the only way to move the needle is in their active efforts.

Step three is limiting the domains that each interviewer assesses. You shouldn’t have to go in and try to decide, “Should we hire this person?” as an interviewer. You should decide, “Does this person meet what we need on these two things?” Because what we know is when cognitive load is heavy, that’s when people are most likely to take shortcuts. And when you’re trying to assess people along five different lines, that’s just really hard to do, for any person, especially in a 30-minute, hour-long interview.

Then step four, and this one’s really critical, is creating rubrics to help interviewers evaluate answers to the questions that they’re asking, or to grade work samples that they’re getting. A rubric can be as simple as: A great answer will hit on these three things, a medium answer will hit on maybe two of those things, a bad answer will not talk about any of these, or maybe it’ll hit on one. These kinds of things really help anchor people in what they’re looking for in interviews, and they limit the common biases that we know affect hiring decisions, like confirmation bias, where you answer a couple of questions really well and I’m primed to look for all the things you do well the rest of the interview. Or

A lot of people in early-stage companies haven’t managed other people before, or don’t have a lot of experience doing that. So they’re just not great at doing basic manager things, like giving feedback. And giving good feedback, feedback about the process—what went wrong, what went well, how can you do better.

You can show what bad feedback looks like. For example: “You’re a good communicator. You did a good job on that project.” In contrast, here’s good feedback: “You communicated well by keeping people up-to-date on the status of your project and being helpful to your coworkers as you worked through challenges.”

Elad: What do you view as the main signs that somebody isn’t scaling? Shannon: Exhaustion. Tardiness. Showing up at meetings completely late and discombobulated. I always tell people, “If you are having a hard time scaling, the best thing to do is to try to be on time so that you’re hiding it a little bit.” You don’t want it to be this completely obvious thing. I think when people aren’t scaling, they micromanage in an incredible way because they feel like that’s the only thing they can really control. They can also get really tactical, really quickly. It becomes, “Well, I can cross that off my list,” as opposed to, “I’m going to tackle this big, chunky strategic issue.” Those are the things to look for, so when you start to get signals from the team—“This person is micromanaging me. They seem really tired. They’re constantly late. They’re hard to reach.”—those are usually signs that the person is over their skis.

Some companies like Amazon go through the exercise of writing the product “headline” at the stage of product conception. For example, when writing a design document, you might think through what the press story on the product will be when it launches. This helps to shape crisp thinking about what you are building and why.

PRDs (product requirement documents),

PRDs should clearly articulate primary features and product needs.

PRD templates and product road maps The starting point of building a product is getting agreement and clarity on what to build. While engineering owns writing the technical design documentation for how a product will be technically architected and work, product management should own writing up the set of requirements for the product itself. Who are you building this product for? What use cases does the product meet? What does it solve for and explicitly not solve for? What are the main features and what does the product do? What are the main product dependencies? A PRD may include wireframes that roughly sketch out the product user journey.

For example, their time may get spent on execution and checklists versus setting product vision and road maps or troubleshooting cross-functional issues. This may lead to ongoing discounting of the role in product in the organization until a more experienced organization is built.

Be aggressive rather than complacent about customer growth early. Outsized companies like Google, Facebook, and Uber were aggressive and calculating about growth from their earliest days. In contrast, non-metric-driven, less aggressive companies failed to reach the next level of success. Too many companies get complacent about distribution if their core product “just works.”

I think people’s true motivations and behavior are revealed, not said. If somebody spends ten minutes telling you how honest they are, I can guarantee you that’s a dishonest person.

The moment you know that you’re working with someone that you would not work with for the rest of your life, stop working with them right there. Save your time.

Taking a persona, like the type 2 consumer diabetic, and thinking about product mechanisms that are going to deliver experiences that consumers need, across industries, is an enormous opportunity.