I’d do it again, but differently.

20 Dec

I forked it up, so you don’t have to.

Merry Christmas! Here are my top learnings from building teams from scratch.

This year I thought I’d gift a few learnings from my years of building teams in tech companies. Whether you’re in a start-up and there’s nothing, or you’re building new functions within existing structures, the learnings remain the same. Stay focused on one thing. Be honest, clear and transparent with the people around you. Don’t get distracted by perfection, and above all else, just do something.

1. Just do it

When I started building my first customer success team, I didn’t know what customer success was. Everyone starts somewhere. The quicker you start, the quicker you’ll fail, the quicker you’ll improve.

Planning can very easily turn into procrastination. Try something, write it down. If it works, do it again and see if it works twice. If it doesn’t work, do something else. Once you’re happy the thing works, figure out what you can cut out to make it bigger/better/faster. Rinse and repeat.

2.Work with a recruiter you trust

When it comes time to make a team of 1 a team of 2, do yourself a favour and find a good recruiter. Trust me.

When you’re in the early days of a very small company and every £ spent counts, it can be hard work justifying recruitment fees, but hear me out. Here are 3 reasons why you should spend money on a great recruiter;

You want good talent, right? Good recruiters know how to pitch roles. It’s literally their job. You’re trying to convince actual, serious, professional people to come and work with you in your tiny little company. You’re going to need some help with that.
I have posted countless jobs on Linkedin and scrolled through the mountain of CVs that you get as a reward. Recruiters cost money because that is a full-time job. Your time has a value. Optimise it.
You need perspective. Recruiting the right people is hard, and sometimes you need a shove here or there so you make the right decision. The best recruiters I have worked with have coached me on everything from interview structure and style to offering roles to candidates I would never have even considered had they come to me directly. Let your recruiter call out your unconscious biases and challenge you on the “culture” you want to build. That alone is worth its weight in gold.

Not sure which recruiters to trust? I’m happy to recommend some really amazing ones; let me know.

3. Get out of your echo chamber as soon as you can

To learn, the very first thing I do is absorb as much information as I can. This has two effects: 1. I start experimenting and putting the theory into practice. 2. I sometimes forget that I’m not an actual expert because I now have so much knowledge in my head.

The first thing is, on the whole, good. The second thing is testament to my ongoing battle with growth mindset. I believe I can do anything I set my mind to. Excellent. However, I suck at being a beginner. Once I’ve absorbed enough information to feel like I know something, I forget that I don’t actually know anything.

Get out of your echo chamber. Even if you do know a lot about a topic, the things that worked in place A may not necessarily work in place B. Don’t be afraid to try things and fail, but you need alternative opinions and advice.

To get out of your echo chamber, you can join a community, hire a coach, or employ someone with more experience than you. Paying for a coach is like paying for the fast-track pass at Disney Land; do it every time. Hiring people more experienced than you is just good sense.

4. Have a balanced but not obsessive relationship with data

There are three parts to this;

Most of us make snap decisions based on opinions or feelings; this is how humans make decisions.
If your opinion differs from someone else’s opinion, it’s a good idea to objectively review the data to let it tell you its story. Either way, don’t be afraid to try an idea on a “hunch” (there’s a bit of your brain designed to give you hunches; google RAS), and don’t be stubborn. Good data should have the power to change your mind.
If your data doesn’t have the power to change someone else’s mind (and it’ll need to), you need better data or a better story. Or both.

To build anything, you need confidence in your abilities to decipher what’s important from what’s urgent. Data can help with this. Data, however, is normally a lagging indicator. What does or doesn’t work is in the data, but you can only see it once it’s happened.

It’s very easy and quite tempting to fall into a data hole, trying to find that one magic number that predicts everything: the mystical leading indicator.

Don’t second-guess every decision. Trying to measure everything will stop you innovating.

Baseline your data. If you’re trying to improve email click-through rate for example, make sure you know what it is currently
Change something. See what happens

That’s it. Now, it’s important to think about the other things that might change as a result of your experiment, but you can’t measure and shouldn’t care about them all. Pick 3 or 4, only the wildly important things and track those. In this example, you might want to try and improve click-through, but you don’t want to negatively impact open rate or response rate, so you might want to monitor those too. That’s it.

If you try and measure everything, you’ll never do anything.

Charisma tells stories. When you’re trying to convince people you’re right, lean on it heavily. Data, however, is the panacea to “we’ve always done it this way”, or you know, just standard middle-aged white man thinking.

Be selective about how and what you measure. Tell its story impeccably. If your data doesn’t add up, listen to it.

5. Focus on one thing at a time

If everything is important, nothing is important.

It’s very easy to get overwhelmed doing stuff when everything needs to be done.

Focus is the most important thing for small teams. Your number one job as leader is to give focus. If you can’t direct your team to the wildly important goal, you’re going to lose traction. Trying to get people to focus on more than a few things will cause confusion, overwhelm and eventually burnout.

Do one thing really well, get it to good enough and then move on. Be clear about what the thing is and what good enough is.