The path to creating great products isn’t solely dependent on innovation, experience, value, or celebrity entrepreneurs; it heavily relies upon people and processes. This holds particularly true for businesses aiming to scale up their operations, whether they are startups or new projects within a larger corporation.
The kind of team and process required at this stage vastly differs from the initial stages when things were just getting started. Not understanding these differences can make scaling efforts harder, leading to poor outcomes as compared to the potential upsides.
When startups are going from 5 to 50 customers, or from $100K to $1M or $500K to $5M or higher, teams often struggle due to a lack of process. There’s no system in place to replicate at scale and that’s why in some cases, startups fail or slow down instead of accelerating.
So what does it take to set the right process in place to scale up?
There are three key aspects to this.
Most often than not startups consider “process” negatively from past experiences of dealing with government red tape or large companies’ bureaucratic procedures. After all, they’re all set out to “disrupt” things. So they shy away from confining themselves to standards and norms. However, it doesn’t have to be this way; processes are defined ways of handling different situations surrounding product building. They don’t define a startup’s approach to growth or innovation, they define its execution. This in turn makes the product development and operations streamlined and efficient. Startups must accept that they need to set certain processes in place to scale. Processes increase revenue while reducing costs or managing them well, which in turn helps to scale.
Effective scope planning and definition is another area where many startups struggle. A well-defined scope can streamline product development timelines while improving quality standards by simultaneously avoiding rework caused due to compatibility issues down the line. Establishing a clear understanding of how to approach success can ensure your startup stays on track as it grows from five customers to fifty or more while keeping pace with annual sales targets surpassing $100k to $1M, $500K+, etc.
Learning great procedural best practices concerning collaborative workforce management can help teams achieve better outcomes. Scrambling through ad hoc work every day, spending endless meetings discussing various possibilities without clear direction can waste a lot of time and effort. Instead, maintaining continuity through a unified vision with a coordinated effort is key for eventual success.
More often than not, during our Startup Health Checkup audit, we have found that startups struggling to scale often are the ones that don’t have set processes for product development, release and execution. We have often learnt that founders seem to be comfortable with the lack of processes. However, their approach alters when they change their perspective and plan to venture scale. It’s all a matter of setting the right vision.
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