People Before Product

Grow your people first and product growth will follow

Image credit: Author

Growth is the lifeblood of most organisations. Grow or die. Exponential growth is the stuff of dreams. And nightmares. Startups need it. Investors demand it. Tech employees must worship at the altar of it. But what is it that we are all so desperate to grow? Reach? Leads? App downloads? Memberships? Monthly active users? Subscriptions? Recurring subscriptions? Dollar, dollar bills?

Most growth focuses on product traction. Trying desperately to convert that hockey stick curve you promised your investors into reality. But can you really do that alone? Perhaps you can, but then you are a lone penguin without a waddle. And I don’t believe you anyway.

So you need people (or penguins, whatever floats your growth). Good people. And what do good people need? You guessed it — growth. Personal and professional growth. If you don’t give them that, they will starve — feel unrecognised, often disgruntled, and won’t perform at their best. Or simply leave and find another waddle. Consequently, your product growth will stagnate or die.

So here are five steps to creating an organisation that focuses product growth on people first.

1. Forget About OKRs

OKRs can work. In a performance-driven organisation, the objectives-and-key-results methodology can drive growth. But it is not a silver bullet. It requires significant culture change. Retrofitting OKRs into an organisation that already has an established culture of KPIs, mid- and year-end performance reviews, and salary and promotion negotiations is a mammoth task. There are other similar yet more welcoming ways to drive growth.

OKRs, but not

Step 1. BHAG

Set a Big-Hair Audacious Goal for your company. Not a fluffy vision statement but a tangible, measurable target. Something that sets your soul on fire. You know you can do it but only if you really dare. Promise every single employee a certain percentage pay rise if you do.

Step 2. Translate the BHAG

What are the three things you need to do this year as a company to get you a step (or nine) closer to your BHAG? Write these down. Keep it simple. So simple that every single employee should be able to rattle these off when asked.

Step 3. Impact, initiative, and growth

Every human working in your team or organisation needs to have an impact, show initiative, and take time to invest in their own skills in order to keep adding value. So give everyone an opportunity to do just that. Each month, ask every person to pick a focus area: impact, initiative, or growth.

Impact: Do something that will have an immediate and visible impact on the company's annual horizons.

Initiative: Discover something or someone that needs improvement and take steps to achieve this.

Growth: Learn something new or invest time and effort into developing a new skill.

The focus area picked by each person must be different from what they picked the previous month, and everyone must cycle through all three every three months. Why? Because growth invariably takes a back-seat. There are always a million and one things to do that require your immediate attention. Growth then becomes a “nice to have.” So make sure that once every three months, each person in your organisation is taking the time to reflect on and invest in their own development.

Within this focus area, each person can define a goal for themselves. Keep it tweet-sized. The idea is to make this as lean a process as possible and to keep focus across the organisation on the annual horizons and the BHAG.

That’s it. One company-wide BHAG translated into three company annual horizons and further broken down into monthly individual focus areas.

But how does this tie into individual performance reviews and promotions? Let’s keep going.

2. Dethrone Bosses

You are not the boss of me

Forget about line managers. Give everyone in your team or organisation a coach. A coach implies that the person is not there to manage you, but to help you to learn and grow. Give the coach enough authority and autonomy to positively impact peoples’ performance but take away any power to negatively impact their growth. Do this by making performance a peer-reviewed process.

As part of picking a monthly focus area (impact, initiative, or growth) and defining a tweet-sized goal, each person must also pick two or three of their peers to give them feedback on their progress at the end of the month. The role of the coach is then to help them achieve their goal — make connections, direct resources, brainstorm ideas, and remove obstacles. At the end of the month, the coach collects feedback from the nominated peers and conducts a retrospective before helping their direct reports to pick a new focus area and define new goals.

You can add a quarterly or half-yearly retrospective to the above, between a coach and their direct reports. This is a chance for each person to reflect on their performance over the last few months and get more holistic feedback from their peers. Here the coach can also discuss individual growth ambitions and lay out concrete plans to help their direct reports to advance to the next level.

Okay, great. Now before we talk about promotions, let’s talk about growth paths. Advancement within an organisation first requires a clear hierarchy of growth.

3. Create Hierarchy but Level the Playing Field

Every collective needs some form of hierarchy to function effectively. But the word hierarchy is loaded with negative connotations. What you really need is levels of growth. Some martial arts have belts. This might not work so well in a tech organisation, but apprenticeship levels do work.

Apprenticeship levels and job title descriptors

You can add many more levels as you see fit. Of utmost importance is that each level should have clearly defined skills, expectations, and responsibilities. The same levels should apply to everyone in your organisation, no matter if they work in marketing, product, design, or engineering. This can be a difficult sell because often specific technical skills are hard to come by, so you may value them more. But this value is subjective. Yes, you cannot build a good, scalable tech product without good software engineers. But you also cannot sell that tech product without good product evangelists. Product growth needs both kinds of skills. So level the playing field, and if you hire a marketeer, then learn to value them as much as your React Native developers.

Once you have created this growth hierarchy, make it transparent and tangible. Every person in your organisation should know their level and what they need to do to advance or graduate to the next level. For example, a Novice software engineer can advance to Accomplished if they learn Java, how to deal with errors, and to write unit tests. An Accomplished product manager can advance to Experienced if they can demonstrate the ability to present technical concepts in simple business language to a range of stakeholders.

No matter what anyone says, job titles matter. They reference decision-making power and confer status. People care about their job titles. So it is a good idea to also attach a job title descriptor to each level.

Do you see what you have done? You have created a growth path for every single person in your organisation. Give yourself a pat on the back. Now let’s keep going down this yellow brick road.

4. Promote Based on Nominations

So how does someone actually get promoted, or in our case, graduate from one level to another? In organisations that are traditionally set up, you would have a performance review either once every six months or sometimes once a year. This is a fear-inducing experience which leaves no one feeling particularly happy. So if we have monthly individual focus areas and tweet-sized goals that are peer-reviewed, and monthly retrospectives that also share feedback from peers… You get where I’m going with this.

Anyone can nominate any of their peers to advance to the next level. Two other people have to support this nomination. That’s it. The nominee advances and gets a new job title and an automatic, pre-defined pay rise. Let’s discuss the latter next.

5. Stop All Salary Negotiations

Negotiations benefit the confident, articulate humans who know how to debate and turn a phrase. Those are great skills to have, no doubt, but when it comes to salary negotiations, this means that the quiet achievers often draw the short straw. Also, gender plays a major role, resulting in a significant gender pay gap, particularly in the tech industry. So let’s stop salary negotiations and use a fair pay formula instead.

Calculate the pay of every new hire using the formula above. Base is a starting salary that you decide on, taking into account affordability and demand in your region/s of operation. Values is how closely the beliefs and behaviours of the person you’re hiring align with the purpose and values of your organisation. As a general rule, hire for values fit and culture add. Create a short survey and ask every person interviewing a candidate to fill in their perception of the candidate’s values fit. Use the average score in your fair pay formula. Do the same for Mastery Level.

Mastery Level indicates the new hire’s level in your organisation — from Intern to Leadership. This final value should be the only negotiable part of your formula. If the candidate is unhappy with the offer you present based on this formula, then allow them to convince you of their Mastery Level. This makes the discussion about their fit for the job, not their take-home salary. Most people have a much easier time negotiating this.

All the previous steps make it clear that performance that is aligned with your core values and goals is expected of everyone within your organisation. If someone is underperforming, their peers should and will hold them accountable. This means that as long as your organisation continues to grow, all employees’ annual pay raises should be guaranteed without negotiation. To be fair, set a pre-defined percentage that applies to everyone in the organisation. If an underperforming individual still upholds your organisational values and works towards achieving its purpose, then they usually deserve a second chance. Else, part ways.

Summary

Image credit: Author

Growth of your products is intrinsically tied to the growth and success of your people. An organisation that promotes growth and development will foster individuals who thrive, welcome challenges, and hold each other accountable. This creates an environment where ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things.

1. Set a company BHAG and a few short, memorable annual goals. Translate these into monthly peer-reviewed individual focus areas and tweet-sized goals.
2. Give everyone a coach to help them grow and advance within your organisation.
3. Create apprenticeship levels and make the expectations of each level clear.
4. Let promotions be based on nominations by peers.
5. Set pay based on a fair pay formula and negotiate fit-for-job rather than take-home pay.

That’s it. Not easy I know, but leadership rarely is. If it were easy, everyone would do it.

From one human to another, thanks for reading. It’s been emotional. Image credit: Author

Thanks to Pieter Waller and Gideon van Dijk who helped to formulate many of the ideas above. Here’s to the continued success of our not-so-little experiment!