Can working without managers increase efficiency and productivity?
Post raising our seed round and going from 2 to 7 people, at Mitoo we have been on a journey of discovery.
Everyone wants to have the highest possible output and to get the right work-life balance at the same time. Like many other we’ve been constantly looking for the most efficient ways to work as a team in order to deliver quality in the right priority order.
In doing this we have learned a huge amount, so I plan to post our discoveries over time, but I think it is the most recent change that has has the biggest impact.
Back in October of this year I flew to San Francisco to meet up with some great friends and fellow startups on the Seedcamp US trip. Now in its second year the Seedcamp partners lead the group on an AngelList office visit. Now if truth be told, as much as I love AngelList and the team behind it (I was a VentureHacks lover pre AL), having seen Nival talk countless times and having met Ash at 500 Startups I didn’t really fancy another group discussion on how to get featured. But before I had a chance to break from the group we were through the door.
Lucky too, because the talk by Ash that followed has had a big impact on our work processes at Mitoo. Ash talked about AngelList’s team structure of ‘1-Man-Startups’ and how they focus on ‘Leverage’ and ‘Velocity’. It struck a chord and came just as I was planning to try some new changes to team structure. Implementing this 1-man-startup approach has directly increased our progress on the most important things. Here’s the skinny:
Previously at Mitoo I was really the only one dealing with vision/strategy/prioritization. I would say that I had the better information / most insight, so the challenge became making sure that the team are actioning this strategy
“lack of insight to strategy would mean that micro decisions would regularly be made that were not the right ones”
The main problem with this structure was that the lack of efficiency in management time. The team would occasionally need to be course-corrected to keep to strategy. In essence, the lack of insight to strategy would mean that micro decisions would regularly be made that were not the right ones, and that problems would be passed back up the management chain for solutions.
How we were structured before:
- We would work in 2 week ‘sprints’
- Team would feedback product ideas to Piers (CTO) / myself (CEO)
- Piers and I would deal with biz and product strategy.— When this meant large UX changes I would sketch UX/IA up
- Piers and I would iterate/look to each-other for buy-in on UX changes
- Piers would take product spec beyond my headline UX/sometimes take one of our front-end focused guys out to work on design elements with him
- Once complete we would present to dev-team for next 2-week iteration
Problems:
- Each sprint plan would get changed during progress due to Bugs / issues not predicted
- There would regularly be a knock on effect that had not been predicted. As dev team were not in product-problem-solving mode they found these hard to deal with, instead sending issues back up to Piers and me to solve.
- It was hard for one person to keep on top of spec, dev, and people all at the same time
- We would regularly deliver less than we have hoped in a sprint
- Product still moved quickly but we did not feel that we were working as well as we could
- Customer development / marketing / development were disconnected within the team
There is of-course nothing to say that a structured manger-led teams can not be efficient and on strategy, but in a startup, huge value comes from the ability to move quickly, make decisions quickly and change course if needed. In a manger-led structure these things take time. So we switched it up….
New manager-less ‘1-man-Startup’ structure:
- Our work is now focused into ‘Projects’ that impact a specific Mitoo objective/metric/goal
- Each project encompasses everything from Customer Dev to Marketing/Sales to UX/Design to Launch
- Project ideas go into a Trello board for everyone to see
- No one works for anyone else directly
- Anyone can decide to take the lead to make something happen
- If someone wants help to get all elements of the project complete they must convince others to join them in the project
- No deadlines
- No structured meetings
Impact:
- Whole team more creative
- Problems are solved by team more quickly
- Less time in meetings
- More frequent deployments
- Better understanding of business as a whole by team
Of course, this requires incredibly rounded individuals or ‘project teams’. Each project has to deal with, customer development, sales, strategy, design, UX, Front-end, back-end, marketing etc. In-fact, at AngelList, everybody can code and everybody has started a startup. At Mitoo, all of us can code at least a little and 5/7 of us have started a startup before.
The result of all of this is that the team is ruthlessly focused on the right things with a fraction of the input from me. They understand the strategy, they understand why, and they make the right decisions, quicker. We have always had high quality output, but now it is really focused on the right things.
Notes:
1. As part of this process it is important to define goals. We like Adam Nash’s style.
As a team we defined: The game we are playing > How we keep score > The priorities for this. Then we made sure the whole team were explicitly aware of these priorities and why.
Now we are able to allow everyone to freely run at achieving this. I still have an strategic overview, but the result of this is just tweaking priorities.
2. Each project must also be precisely defined (What is its goal? What metric will it move? Who is the leader? Who will do what?) and we still discuss what projects will have the biggest impact as a team (but hope to reduce this discussion over time).