


The unfortunate aspect for these technical/product founders, however, is that as their product becomes more successful, they often spend less time on doing the things they love—creating great product and iterating. Many founders will find that they have to spend more time meeting with investors to raise money and dealing with internal employee issues. In addition, many founders will find that once they raise capital and hire more people, that their one room, one whiteboard open management style is hard to scale.

So, the question is how to get everyone on the same page? How do you continue to be open and yet layer a simple process to create a shared vision and accountability? Given that, I am bringing back an old post from 2007 on scaling your management style. I want to be very clear though—do not be a slave to process and keep this simple. At the same time, I hope some of these suggestions help:

What makes a startup team great early on in terms of getting product out the door and rapidly refining and honing the product from live market feedback, can also lead to issues down the road if companies and employees are managed on a similar basis. What is easy to roll out in a five-person company gets harder to manage in a 25-person and even harder in a 50-person company. Take the test: Ask your key executives what the three key company goals are for the month? Are they the same or not? How will they help contribute in each of their functions to delivering on the three key company goals? If they are not on the same page and you have trouble getting them together, you may want to continue reading for some thoughts on how to improve communication and accountability.

Here are some simple steps you can take to create a more fluid organization:



In addition, having weekly management meetings and clear weekly goals with simple yes/no criteria goes a long way toward creating an action-oriented culture of getting results. If a VP doesn't deliver consistently, all of the other executives know and they also know it is time to make a change. No one wants to be the manager that is known to over promise and not deliver. There is also a real difference between a manager having weekly individual meetings with their CEO vs. openly discussing the irr priorities and completed tasks with their peers. With respect to cross functional communication, rather than complaining about engineering, for example, sales and marketing can now understand engineering priorities and what it may take to adjust and rearrange some of them to meet the revenue targets for the quarter. Trust me, there are many more factors to a company's success and failure, but please don't make an allergic reaction to scheduled meetings and a simple lack of organization your cause for execution problems.



This article originally appeared at Beyond VC. Copyright 2014.