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Offsites for Startups – Why They’re Needed and How to Conduct Them

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Let me set the stage.  You started your company 12-18 months ago with incredible energy, formed a great team, raised some money, and got to work.  You talked with customers, implemented scrum, drank a lot of coffee, shipped some product, held some launch parties, and attended a ton of entrepreneur-focused events.  All was great, for a while.

Then you started noticing some signs that things weren’t all rosy on the home front, and fear started creeping in:

  • you felt like your team wasn’t working long enough hours during the week, and God forbid put in a weekend effort, even though sprints ended with undone tasks
  • other startups seem to have much better cultures, and overall get more done
  • you wonder why team members don’t stretch themselves more to take on additional tasks, or try new things
  • kitchen-cleanup never seems to be done by certain people
  • certain team members log 5x the bugs of anyone else on the team
  • the team is talking less with one another, and snapping at each other more often
  • folks aren’t as enthusiastic to attend happy hours together

If any of these are familiar, I’d recommend that you consider holding a team offsite, and make offsites part of your regular routine.  You may feel like they are a bit Dilbertesque, but I’ve personally found them to be very helpful, and I’ve also given this advice to other CEOs at rapidly-growing ($10s of millions in revenue) startups, and they came back with very positive feedback as well.

Why hold offsites?
They are a great way to reset the team – think of them as another CEO tool to engineer for peak efficiency.  You get a chance, out of the office, to (a) share high-level successes and failures, (b) set expectations, (c) get feedback from the team, and really, to remind everyone that they’re important parts of your unique culture and thus have both a right and obligation to actively participate (this is one of the reasons they’re working for you and making less money than they would at a big company, right?!?)  And, hopefully you’ll have some fun as well.

When should you hold offsites?
See above 🙂  It’s possible to just do them ‘as needed’; but you’ll likely find a normal flow to needing them.  My experience has been that they make sense every 4-6 months, as a certain amount of scarring builds up from the stresses of sprints, bugs, and realized inefficiencies.

How do you organize your offsite?
Obviously, you’ll come up with your own flavor over time.  But, if it’s your first one, and your team is 3-10 people, this is what I recommend as a rough template.

First, I’d recommend requesting/requiring ‘writing assignments’ from all team members.  They don’t need to be long (a paragraph or two can answer each, and grammar isn’t important).  Send these out a few days ahead of time, and ask them to email their replies to you the afternoon before the offsite.  Examples of questions we used:

  • Why did you join this startup?  What do you want to accomplish?  What’s success for YOU?
  • What do you expect from your co-workers?  And what should they expect from you?
  • Rank our core values in order of importance/relevance.
  • Are there any we should remove, or add?
  • What future features/product changes do you feel strongly that we should consider? (they don’t need to be on our current roadmap

I promise that you will be inspired by the answers you receive.  This simple exercise will remind everyone why they joined your company, and let them say in their own words what their goals are, rather than listening to you set the agenda.  And, they’ll help you course correct, as a team, if there are competing agendas.

Rough time/agenda:

  • 30-60 minutes (probably a few slides prepared by you to make it easy to follow) – review goals, accomplishments, failures (not finger pointing – they are what they are)
  • 2ish hours – have people read their answers to the writing assignments.  Do one question, with answers from everyone, before moving on to the next question.  There will definitely be some overlap in answers, but I promise you that the team will be inspired to hear the goals and expectations, coming from the individual team members themselves.  You should take notes, listening for themes that should be addressed, or issues that you can quickly resolve (do this later in the offsite, rather than real time, so that you allow everyone’s voice to be heard — this also allows you to stay out of tactical shifts in real-time).
  • Team lunch/BBQ – make it together (usually this is easy if you hold the offsite at someone’s house, or at a place where you can cook outside).  Invariably you’ll have a few team members who are more adept in the kitchen, and can drive this.
  • 30 minutes – review what you heard from everyone in the morning.  Are there themes that arose that can or should be addressed?  Any surprises from people?

These last sections could have some prepared slides to review with everyone:

  • 30 minutes – Review how you think your business model works (with actual metrics).  Get reaction to this — is it reality?
  • 30 minutes – Review current Product Backlog / Quick-Hit Backlog (top 20-40 of each).  How do these mesh with earlier discussions?  Any changes needed?
  • 30 minutes – Discuss ‘how’ you get work done.  Review your processes (scrum, release cycles, etc). Are changes needed?   Longer/shorter?  Work hours/effort needed/expected?  (you may be surprised that others want to see bigger efforts as well!)  Make some changes based on what the team’s telling you, if you all think it will help you achieve your goals.
  • 2-3 hours – true/fun activity.  Don’t force it.  Figure out something that fits with your culture, and includes everyone.  For TeachStreet, this may have been us taking a class together (and then going for beers).  But the connection to our culture/values was important, even here.

What do you do after the offsite?
I think it’s important that on the day after the offsite, you summarize what you heard (get feedback if anyone thinks you missed anything important), and share/implement changes or next steps immediately. Don’t lose the momentum from the day!  This can be a powerful way to reset expectations, and make it clear that everyone shared in them.

These are some examples of changes I’ve seen, or been part of.  You’ll come up with your own:

  • developed our list of core values
  • implemented new sprint cycle length because our initial one was too short (we were spending too much time planning, and too little time building)
  • started new process to share work product regularly, on Friday afternoons
  • added a new comped snack policy (people asked if we could have snacks — we quickly said “sure – $100-$150/week in snacks – only requirement is that we all shared the responsibility to place the order each week”)
  • new work-hour expectations (this is a never-ending challenge!)

Hopefully you’ll come out of the day with more collective energy, and renewed team focus.  And in a few months, you’ll likely need to do it all over again, for many of the same reasons.  Your organization is an evolving organism, so you need to constantly shed the bad behaviors, and try new ones that feel right for your team.  Good luck!

p.s. Please share any offsite tips in the comments.

Recruiting and Interviewing Tips for Early Stage Startups

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recruiting a great team

As part of my time with startups at AWS Office/Mentor sessions, I’m often asked to give a presentation on some interviewing and recruiting tips for startups. The advice is actually pretty germane to all recruiting.  This presentation can be found here (having issues getting the embed to work directly on my blog…).

End of day, recruiting for me is about a few things:

  1. Know what you’re recruiting for.  Of course, you need to know what specific skills you want for the role.  But more important, you need to know the culture you want for your team, and the types of people you want.  Then you have to set the bar for greatness and be 100% sure you nail your must-haves, and that the candidate raises the bar on at least a few dimensions.
  2. Know what you’re going to ask the candidates.  You should have prepared before the interview, and have your questions planned (and you should have used your questions with candidates previously, so that you know what a great answer looks like)
  3. Use a behavioral interviewing technique.  Once you know what you’re looking for, ask repeatedly for them to give you examples from their past where they demonstrated those characteristics.  Dig into their answers. Ask them what their role was on the team.  How did they know they achieved the goal, or failed.  What did they do change based on what they learned, and what was the person’s specific ownership/deliver element with that?
  4. Take a lot of notes during the interview.  What did you ask?  How did they answer?  Develop shorthand for flagging the good and bad, so you can distill it later, and/or ask follow-on questions.
  5. Develop a firm opinion.  Are they a strong hire?  A Hire?  A No Hire?  Or, a dreaded Strong No Hire?  Be ready to explain to the other interviewers why you said so, and be able to explain the questions you asked, and where they fell short.  This is where your notes are critical.

There are a few other tips/tricks in there:

  • Some questions I almost always ask at the beginning/end of interviews, and why, such as “What did you do to prepare for this interview?”, “What 3 changes do you think we need to make to our product, to blow away our customers”, and “What 3 adjectives would your past co-workers/managers use to describe you?”
  • How to structure interview loops, and why I recommend interviewing many candidates at once, if possible – it makes it so much easier to spot passion and preparedness when you interview several candidates on the same day, or in succession.
  • How to prepare all of the interviewers (everyone should have assigned characteristics to interview for; everyone should agree that they will independently determine a hire/no-hire vote with detail supporting it; debrief within 24 hours)
  • Why spending more than 2 minutes on a resume walk-thru is lazy/pointless, and a way to get a quick overview, but force them to tell you the story of why it makes sense that your role is perfect for them (and you)
  • What to look for with references (evidences of ‘greatness’; dig on anything where they aren’t raving about a candidate; everyone has dev areas)

Hiring for Startups (by @DaveSchappell) from Dave Schappell

I mentioned it on the final slide of the presentation, but it benefited greatly from contributions from Neil Roseman and Mark Suster (noticing a trend here?) — and another awesome post from Brett Hurt (founder at both BazaarVoice and CoreMetrics).

Stop criticizing yourself

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A few weeks ago, I found myself nagging Karen (my wife) about spending money, and allowed it to escalate into a pretty big issue over the course of several weeks. Once it reached a head, it resolved itself pretty quickly (more on that in another post, about the need for partnership in relationships… that realization has made a big impact recently). Along the way, though, I realized that I’ve been the one generating some of the really big outflows (investments in TeachStreet, buying and selling fun cars, etc) while she spends money on smaller things (clothing, shoes, etc). The point is that I could have just as easily pointed the finger at myself, and by criticizing her, I was really doing just that. I thought about that in two other contexts lately.

First, there was the article about “Are homophobes gay?” that made the rounds on the web. It seems increasingly common that those who are the most critical of other groups end up being members of those groups in some way. We’ve seen it with Ted Haggard and others. Anytime I see someone far out on the extremes, I wonder about their motivation? And, on a larger scale, I’ve often discussed with Karen, why do some people care so strongly about topics such as allowing gay people to marry? It truly doesn’t impact them in any way. It just makes other people happy.

On a much smaller scale, I’ve been a member of many online and offline groups over the years. With online groups, rules inevitably crop up about who can post what, and how often. The other day, someone posted something self-promotional, and several people loudly popped up to shut down the atrocity. Then, a few days later, one of those people did exactly the same thing. When challenged, the answer was along the lines of ‘turnabout is fair play’.

Seems like some consistent themes. That those who try to impose the rules want to be above the same rules. Or something like that. So, stop criticizing yourself, Dave.

Best Practices for Hiring (and firing) Startup Employees

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I was fortunate to learn many of the basics of hiring (interviewing, job descriptions, networking), management (goal setting, reviewing performance, PIPs) and firing (layoffs, termination) in previous roles — Amazon.com was extremely good at teaching me effective, behavioral interviewing practices, and many other elements of this presentation.

But it wasn’t until I founded TeachStreet that I became the person wholly responsible for the implementation of the decisions throughout the process — the presentation included below tries to summarize many of the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

The Founders Institute asked me to give a presentation this evening in Settle, covering the topics “Hiring, Firing and Co-founders” — really, I think these principles apply to all early-stage startup employees (who all share characteristics of co-founders). I’m sure that I’ve omitted elements in the attached presentation, but I’d appreciate any feedback, and I hope you find this useful.

I have the greatest respect for my current and (most of my 🙂 ) past co-workers — I hope that the terminology in the presentation doesn’t convey anything different than that — I tried to use terms and imagery that will stick with the imagination and memories of the audience.

Keep in mind that employees can substitute the word ’employer for employee’ in almost all cases — that is, if your employer/boss sucks, you should fire them as quickly as possible!

You Can’t Pay Someone to Care

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I’m not sure if this is an original thought or not, but I didn’t want to do a Google search to find out that I am again, unoriginal. I was thinking today about the fact that “You Can’t Pay Someone to Care”.

You can pay a person to do a job, and you can reward them for doing a great job. You can pay someone to work overtime, and to work on weekends. You can even pay them to do something they hate.

But, you can’t pay them to care. They either care, or they don’t. And if they don’t care, you’re screwed, because they’re going to create so many hidden problems for you that you’re kidding yourself by keeping them around.

Do them a favor. Do the other employees a favor. And, most important, do yourself a favor.

Amputate them from your organization. Remove them from your life. Fast.

Oh yes… and if you don’t care about what you’re doing… change it!