But in many cases progress comes from taking paths less traveled.” Rigor doesn’t mean not-invented-here syndrome we’re interested in the world around us and think that other companies, industries, and academic fields have a lot to teach us. We work hard to detect the errors in received wisdom. Think rigorously: “We care about getting things right and it often takes reasoning from first principles to get there. Stripe calls them “Operating Principles.” (Many companies have “values,” but Stripe wanted to distinguish philosophical beliefs from the concrete principles that should be applied to the day-to-day work of running the business.) Two of Stripe’s operating principles, as Johnson describes them, are: Once they’re written down, you need to repeat them constantly until everyone has internalized them. According to Johnson, you need to document concrete core tenets describing the way you work. But as your team scales, and as you hit unprecedented new milestones, you’ll feel like you the guidelines on what makes a “good decision” start to blur.Īs COO of Stripe, Claire Hughes Johnson has developed a decision-making framework that has become a sort of shared decision-making compass for all members of the team, new and old. When a startup team is small and more or less in sync, most choices can be decided by the founding team. Codify a set of decision-guiding principles We hope they’ll help take the dread out of decision-making and lend you clarity on choices that can drive your startup forward. They include strategies for distilling the information needed to make a decision, testing potential solutions and reconciling clashing perspectives. In this roundup, we’ve gathered six time-tested tools, frameworks and principles for making high-quality decisions at fast-moving startups. A common theme arose: The art of decision-making isn’t always about capturing some elusive “best” decision - it’s about making the most of information available, garnering trust across stakeholders and executing with conviction. In search of insight, we pored through advice from seasoned leaders who’ve tackled the most challenging decisions in scaling startups and large companies alike. How do you make a choice that optimizes for both speed and sagacity? Should you place more weight on data, or go with your gut? How do you reconcile viewpoints among smart, strong-willed operators, without fanning the flames of conflict? On a team, it’s difficult to get consensus on what the “best” option even means with an excess of choices, leaders can fall into the paralysis of indecision, wasting precious time and opportunities. The dilemma, of course, is that high-stakes decisions are seldom so clearly cut. Where good decisions can accelerate your company’s growth and foster trust among teams, bad decisions can endanger the bottom line and injure morale, sometimes irreversibly. And while the everyday decisions (what to eat for breakfast, whether to read this article) don’t sap much mental energy, the choices that we encounter at scaling startups are often far more weighty: Deliberation on whether or not to raise a new round, or which new product feature to add to the roadmap, is intensified by a high-pressure environment with no safety net. When it comes to the choices we make, most of us like to think we’ve made the “best” decision.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |