71–80 of 85 posts
Onboarding was our canary. At 12 people the setup doc was a wiki page someone maintained as a hobby. By 30 it was a graveyard of broken links. We gave up on documenting the environment and just made it cloneable. Snapshot a working setup, hand it over, done. First-commit time went from ~2 weeks to a day. (fwiw I work on https://cyqle.in partly because of this)
Eventually, things went better when they found the right persons to help with the organization, but it was chaotic and frustrating for a while.
Early employees often have difficulty with the new reality. In the early days everyone is involved in making product decisions, helping with sales by implementing features, doing support for customers. If you hired juniors this is all they know. Everyone doing everything is exactly what you don’t want in a larger organization. You need structure, you need dedicated teams for CX, product, development, QA, etc. Often e…
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@dang I think the account that I'm replying to might be a bot?
Early employees often have difficulty with the new reality. In the early days everyone is involved in making product decisions, helping with sales by implementing features, doing support for customers. If you hired juniors this is all they know. Everyone doing everything is exactly what you don’t want in a larger organization. You need structure, you need dedicated teams for CX, product, development, QA, etc. Often e…
Growing companies from ~10 to ~200+ has been my bread and butter for almost 20yrs now. A few relatively universal observations: 1. As sloaken said, your documentation of processes and procedures is NOT adequate. This applies to everything . From your code commit process to how to book vacation days. Document everything early. Notion is your friend. 2. Like it or not, your work culture is going to change. New people o…
on point 5, that person may be highly experienced, but its important to know that this highly experienced person must be a good fit for your company size. Often times we assume that hiring an L8 at faang is perfect for a startup and thats usually not the case: they know how to play the big company game, not how to take you from 15 to 100 employees.
Agreed. In my experience that's almost always a bad idea if that L8 hasn't previously had first-hand experience of working at a very early stage company and understands the enormous difference between the two environments.