To Grow Faster, Ask These Questions

A lot of companies don’t decide how they want to grow until they’re well into their growth phase. For a long time, your actions pull your company along, and then all of a sudden it switches — your existing business starts pushing your behavior. External forces like feature requests, the need for more customer support, the need to create a team to do X when you never even needed to do X before — those forces start to dictate your decisions.

Here’s a list of questions companies should ask themselves as they head into rapid growth — ideally in that relatively brief moment right after clinching product-market fit.

1. Have we documented our operating principles?
   When you hit growth, a lot of unprecedented things start to happen, and you’ll feel like you have no guidelines to make good decisions. On top of that, many new people who were not there when the company started will need to make decisions too. They need a framework to help them do that. This is why you need to document core tenets describing the way you work. Once they’re written down, you need to repeat them constantly until everyone has internalized them.
   
   Your principles should be clear and explicit enough that the people who consult them will make the same decisions a founder of your company would. They should also be defined in a way that acknowledges potential tensions. When two principles seem to conflict, the context should tell you which principle should take precedence. In this way, your core tenets serve more as a guide to action than a toothless list of nice-to-haves. This also makes them a useful rubric for hiring new people and assessing performance. Do candidates have aptitudes or experiences that align with your operating principles? Do existing employees execute their responsibilities in a way that upholds them? You should bake your operating principles into both your hiring and performance review processes to make them useful and keep them top of mind.
2. What structure is going to help us achieve our goals?
   Along with growth comes the need for formal management. Even if you’re committed to staying pretty flat, you need make responsibilities and escalation pathways clear. Every company needs to decide on a structure that fits their specific goals. Maybe you need more hierarchy to execute on very complex processes with a lot of hand-offs. Maybe you need less because you want all employees to be immediately responsive to customers’ questions without having to double-check with someone else.
   
   Critical to choosing the right structure is creating ways you will change and evolve it. You want to anticipate that the size and shape and number of people around any given table is bound to change. “It’s a good habit to check in every six months to blow up meetings that have gotten entrenched, stale, or no longer productive. You don’t want to get attached to thinking that a certain process is the only way to do something, or that you need a certain combination of people to get something done.”
3. Who has been successful at our company so far?
   Take the time to ask: Okay, what kind of people have we hired? Are they a diverse enough group to bring different perspectives and experience to the company? Who’s doing really well? Who’s scaling at the same pace as the company? What are those people’s characteristics? In fact, making a list of their attributes is a good way to either define, reinforce or tweak your operating principles to make sure they’re aligned.
4. Do we have a 5-year plan?
   It shouldn’t be some monumental, time-consuming ordeal. It should be as simple as three to five paragraphs briefly describing the biggest, macro goals the company wants to make sure it’s pursuing over the next five years or so. Once you’ve defined how you want to work, the best structure for your company, the type of employees you want to work with — this document outlines what you’re harnessing all of these resources to accomplish.
   
   Also important: the plan you publish should be stored somewhere central where it can be easily referenced. And it should be core to new employee onboarding, alongside your operating principles. It may be tweaked over the years as you learn about your business or customers, but ideally, the goals you enshrine in it should be so intrinsic to why you founded the company that they don’t change much.
   
   When making product decisions, you want people to reference the plan — “Is this new idea or feature serving our overarching objectives?” Or “should we launch this thing even if it doesn’t serve any of our 5-year objectives?” Your constitutional document empowers people to ask and answer these questions so your company doesn’t get distracted from the things you absolutely believe you must do to succeed.
5. Do we have a way to measure the employee experience?
   Every scaling company needs mechanisms in place to gauge and respond to employee satisfaction levels. Stripe, for instance, surveys its workforce every six months. “This might seem really frequent for a company our size, but when you’re growing this fast, things are always changing. It’s important that we keep tabs on how people feel about our direction.”
   
   Startups can use the results of the survey to determine what to do next.
6. Are we decentralizing decision making?
   One of the biggest challenges any growing company faces is equipping employees with the information, agency and confidence to make decisions for the company on their own. As a founder or executive leader, you can’t always be there to make a call. You have to trust that others can do it in order to keep pushing the frontier of your business. To make this possible, Johnson subscribes to the same method as medical residency programs: See one, do one, teach one. Demonstrate how you want work to be done, have them do it themselves, then have them teach new people who are being onboarded what they’ve learned.
   
   It’s important that you start categorizing the common decisions teams have to make, so you can create rules and methods around how to make them. Importantly, there are also set procedures for when new types of deals or decisions are encountered. “When an employee sees a new type of deal for the first time, they know exactly how to elevate it, and who needs to be involved — instead of running around asking a bunch of people. They don’t try to graft an existing process to fit a new situation. They’re triggered to pause and carefully consider their next step with the deal review group.”
   
   To grow successfully, you need to keep pushing the ability to make decisions down through the ranks, so that the people closest to the work can make high-quality, responsible calls.

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