Poeple
How you are going to do 1:1 meetings, performance reviews, estimate needed headcount, and create a great culture.
It can be cliché for average teams, but I strongly believe in having core values to build a sustainable business.
Clarity
Career laddering (after the early stage), role expectations, and company vision should be obvious to the employees, and even the product roadmap should be communicated regularly.
Trust
1:1 meetings are confidential, you trust your leaders that they are creating growth opportunities for you and their aim to get you out of your position to a promotion.
Safety
Feedback is communicated frequently, and you should know if you are doing well, and making a mistake is okay, welcoming calculated risks.
Then you can branch out to other values such as having meaningful/engaging work. Company events are not a good measure and sadly, a common approach that I’ve seen a lot. People are motivated to do what they do best to have autonomy, mastery, and purpose. A good book that I recommend is Motivation by Daniel Pink. https://amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates/dp/1594484805
About defining your own culture
You don’t need to write it at the beginning but make sure you implement it with your team (it’s a necessity to be written when you scale your team) Netflix is very opinionated: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture Amazon is a big player when it comes to believing in its principles https://amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles
Hiring
Hiring, candidate experience, onboarding, branding to attract outstanding talents and performance management.
Look at Guide and what they are doing when it comes to candidate experience
On hiring, I recommend following Nadia’s work
https://review.firstround.com/podcast/episode-87
On vision statement
"Many of the worst vision documents I’ve seen were generated by committees. Small committees can sometimes act as good sounding boards, but they should never play the role of primary authorship or decision-making authority. Unless there is exceptional chemistry and shared vision (generally anathema, given the politics of committees), the prospects of clear, concise, passionate writing are dismal. Therefore, the project manager or leader needs the authority to author the vision and drive one voice into it, with the full understanding that it’s her job not to write a reflection of her own personality, but instead to encapsulate the best ideas and thinking available in the organization. The one author should be a strong collaborator who is able to incorporate the best ideas and opinions of others into a single document"
"How much autonomy will I have? Will I feel included? Will it be safe to make mistakes? Will I be part of the decisions that affect me? How difficult will it be to make progress on my projects? Are people…you know…nice?"
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