Every startup has to undergo the scaling stage in its business lifecycle. And driving it is not as easy as we think of. It’s like a roller coaster ride that sees highs and lows many times. For smooth functioning, you just need to run your business with the right mindset and people you can easily trust.
However, having a brilliant idea is not going to work without the right set of people on board. Adding some people haphazardly is not the right way; instead, if you want to scale your development team effectively, you must hire experienced professionals.
Having an expert and experienced team on the floor is highly important for your business growth.
You can also use the MVP approach that provides your business with an excellent kickstart to implement your product idea from the customer’s perspective.
“What ends up driving the ability to scale is not the product or the service per se, but the team of people that are put in place to serve the clients and build the product or service. If you don’t build that team with rigor and discipline,” Weinfurter says, “it dramatically impedes your ability to grow.”
You must have heard about the “two-pizza rule,” stated by Jeff Bezos. It says that you should be able to feed your entire team with just two pizzas. Else, the group is too big, and you have to divide it.
A smaller team spends less time managing schedules and keeping things up to date, and on the contrary, spends more time doing what needs to be done in comparison to larger teams.
Here is the list of tips that help you scaling a successful startup product development team.
Tip 1: Hire Smart and Passionate People
Before recruiting, make it clear of the role and responsibilities offered. Hire people who best fit in the role and make sure to maintain consistency throughout the company.
For building a solid foundation, you need to scale your team successfully.
The recruitment process is considered the first step in developing a culture that supports an engaged and active workforce equipped with smart and modern techniques of scaling the business.
People who are passionate about their work and have the potential to impact others with their capabilities and talent will take your business to another level.
“Getting the people part of it right is critical,” Weinfurter says. “The right people do all the things that are necessary to get the business to grow: they get the product right; they get the service right; the culture is healthy; they get a motivated team behind them. Everything else falls in line. If you don’t have this right, the opposite happens. It’s a painful and expensive mess.”
Above all, if you want to have a passionate remote team, you need people who can easily connect with and understand your company’s mission.
Tip 2: Keep Leadership on the Same Page
It’s not only the founder’s job to look at the company’s strategy and the mission. Every team leader should own this responsibility to deliver the strategic vision and ensure that the team will execute it.
Every team member of your growing startup should be dedicated entirely to your commitments and maintain a proper corporate culture.
Startups rapidly thrive during its primary stages when the entire team is involved in every aspect of the project. Team members should know their core responsibilities towards the business and adapt to the challenges that come across.
Regular meetings and video conferencing keep everyone aligned and makes every teamwork parallel to our high-level vision. It helps us to communicate seamlessly with no hindrance.
Tip 3: Perform Business Operations Effectively and Be Open to All Challenges
In the initial stages of your growing startup, it’s important for the team to understand the need to scale the business from every aspect.
You need to establish, update, and automate all of your business operations systems efficiently.
Ensure that your team members are flexible enough to adapt to the challenges that arise while scaling the business and investing their 100 percent time and talent in the company’s growth. That means, tip one!
Tip 4: Seamless Communication Is the Way.
Scaling your business requires constant and seamless communication between teams about the company’s values, priorities, and vision. Seamless communication between the in-house and remote teams using remote collaboration tools, i.e., Jira, Slack, Trello, etc., is necessary to assign tasks and responsibilities to each team member.
Also, ease the communication when dealing with the clients as they should get the utmost attention and service they demand.
Tip 5: Automate or Outsource Everything Possible
If any aspect of your startup needs tech expertise or skilled labor, you won’t be able to scale effectively. Before scaling, you need to analyze and figure out how to streamline every process that demands extensive care. Finding ways to automate processing or software development outsourcing tasks/processes to third party vendors can help scale your business.
Automation and outsourcing help free your resources for core offerings to work at scale. Business can then focus more on scaling teams and processes.
Bottom Line
Scaling a startup development team comes with massive growth and myriad challenges in this rapidly changing digital landscape.
When growing your startup business, it’s always crucial to line up your team with the right tech stack and scale your business accordingly. The sustainable success of your business depends on your ability to grow at scale.
So, to succeed, use the tips described above when building a team and developing a product.
