2 Remote Startup Ruts and How to Avoid Them
When you’re in person, startup teams can get away with a certain level of directional ambiguity and disarray. The bill for that sloppiness eventually comes due, but it’s delayed and dispersed over an extended period of time.
A remote-first startup pays immediately, all at once. When your team is remote, alignment can’t bubble up from water cooler conversations and ‘pop-your-head-in’ office chats, so it simply doesn’t happen.
Without conscious investment in peak operations to build and maintain alignment in a remote environment, one of two traps emerge in remote startups.
Rut 1: Unfocused Chaos
The founders have successfully decentralized decision-making and empowered teams to take charge of their areas of expertise but failed to provide the context for those teams to execute as a collective as the company scales. The absence of a Company OS and its sub-frameworks means the company is 2-sheets to the wind without a rudder.
Viewed from up close, each team appears to be executing well. Take a step back, though, and it becomes clear that teams are executing on disjointed priorities in an un-unified jumble.
Rut 2: Anxious Stagnation
The founders remain the single source of truth for decision-making and course-setting. So when the company grows, what used to serve as a source of clarity and vision is now a critical bottleneck to focused execution. Without transparent, peak operations frameworks to align and scale the founders’ intuition, teams default to nervous wheel-spinning.
From afar, the company appears to be aligned and pulling in the same direction. Get up close and you see a lot of busy work. The high-impact stuff is happening, but far slower than need be, and low-impact trifles are filling the time.
The remedy?
Adopt and implement a Company OS containing a prioritization framework, insights framework, and working agreements framework. Together, these three create alignment and scale the founders and leadership team, which means they don’t need to be ‘in the room’ to serve as a constant rudder — the frameworks do the heavy lifting.
Prioritization framework — OKRs are a Groundswell favorite since they can be molded to fit the unique needs and culture of most startups, and scale well (EOS is another option for specific use cases). The goal of the prioritization framework is to maintain transparency around company priorities and definitions of success. Measure What Matters (OKRs) and Traction (EOS) are the two gospels on prioritization frameworks among many more.
Insights framework — in short, data, in 2 forms. The first form is transparent KPIs that foot to the company’s top priorities and high-value activities. The second is learning metrics connected to the outstanding hypothesis the company is testing on the road to learning and growth — check out the Revenue Formula chapter of Levers for a great example. The insight framework aims to enable data-informed decision-making down and across the company, diminishing the role of gut instinct.
Working agreements framework — the “how we do things here” portion of the Company OS. The key tools we use and their best practices, how we make decisions, and mission/vision/values are examples of working agreements. The goal is to align your team around the way work gets done (and why) at a high-level, improving efficiency and buy-in. Implementing these working agreements requires nuance and a light touch; they can be taken too far and stifle creativity if not properly done.
Groundswell Ops specializes in building, implementing, and scaling Company OSs for remote-first startups. If you’re interested in learning more about our approach, book some time with us to chat and see if your startup could benefit from a custom COS.
