Much is made of the software development life cycle in our industry. Less talked about is the business life cycle — how businesses start, mature, and eventually close their doors. Perhaps in the technical field, we spend so much time thinking forward that we forget what happened before. So many business and career decisions are made without this context, and it really is a shame. The phases in the life-cycle of software companies are smaller and more pronounced than in a regular business; to really flourish in the industry we need to understand how that industry works.
A lot has been written about start-ups and the unique challenges they face. I’ve done the start-up thing before a few times and my experiences have been mixed. While the start-up phase is interesting, it’s also fairly simple: a company either makes a sustaining product, or they go under. What I’d like to talk about today is about that period slightly after a company makes its first major success. Some companies seem to grow slowly and organically — shout-outs to Silver Creek Entertainment — but most companies have a phase of rapid expansion, followed by an awkward phase of incorporation.
This awkward phase occurs any time there’s a major shake-up with staffing or a ton of new people are added. (My company is currently in one now.) Sometimes the expansion happens because venture capitalists inject new revenue into a company. Other times a new product happens to hit a sweet spot and bring in a lot more revenue than expected. The reasons for the expansion don’t much change the outcome. New people need to find their place, understand the business goals, figure out how to participate, learn who they’re working with, and so on. Larger corporations talk about “culture” and “team dynamics”. The truth is, culture develops because of peoples interactions with each other. These interactions take time.
How much time depends on a lot of different factors. Hiring outgoing, gregarious people never hurts. Having team-building activities sometimes works, but it needs to be done very carefully. But what seems to be the simplest and most powerful way to gel a team rapidly is to give people ownership of small domains and to make them responsible for setting policy regarding that domain.
This is a hard thing for most companies to do. It seems easier for start-ups that are expanding because of capital infusions, but even then, it’s a challenge. Fundamentally, it’s a trust issue. The people who made the company what it is want to protect what they’ve created, even if that means shutting new people out. And there’s a long term issue of the domains being created becoming prisons or for the business to become over-reliant on individual people. But all of these challenges have solutions.
First, this doesn’t mean handing over the business to the monkeys. We all have a role to play; C-level executives create vision, target markets, and set policy for which products will be made. Product owners set policy for what features will be in the product. Developers set policy for how those features are implemented in the domains they’re responsible for. But within the domain that one is responsible for, one should have ownership of the decisions.
As for the idea of over-reliance on an individual or roles becoming prisons, documentation is critical. In fact, I would argue that the main point of documentation is to give those who are not currently responsible for a given domain the information required to make the right decisions on policy in that domain. But I’ve yet to see a software business that defines a comprehensive documentation policy.
The rewards for structuring the business so that employees have ownership over their domains are tremendous. People gain a stake in the business, and they gain pride in their work. In other words, they care, and that caring will reflect itself in their work. (Unless you hire a bunch of deadbeats, but that’s a topic for another post.) If you can get your employees to care about your business, then they’ll get your customers to care, and when that happens, you get Three Rings Design or Trileet or Fog Creek Software. It’s a beautiful thing.
Until next time,
Practice Makes
