As companies grow, the agile culture of “think fast, act fast’ must eventually play nicely with the anchor of sustainability. This transition can be a bit of a mind-bend and even feel like operating in two worlds, especially in the beginning.
The question becomes: “is it possible to integrate consistent systems and processes and still maintain the benefits of the fast-moving startup culture?” Put another way: how can you get just corporate enough to yield sustainable business and growth, while maintaining startup culture?
This is possible, and it requires simple planning and tenacious leaders with a commitment to communication. As you reach a certain level of growth in your startup phase, what you create must maintain a certain standard of delivery, respond to the market, manage shifting business goals, and keep customers happy.
Oddly enough, larger corporations are actually struggling with the same conversation on the other end. They are beginning to integrate agile methods into their system implementations. They are finding that their systems, processes, and traditional way of doing things is hard to maintain in agile development world. Yet they see the value, and struggle to make it work.
I’ve worked on system implementations since 2006 and have seen the insides of a number of companies in industries varying from retail, to entertainment, to health care. On a recent project with an entertainment giant that consistently pushes the envelope, the company in question implemented a completely customized system that billions of dollars flowed through using agile methods.
Having seen both sides of the equation — from small budgets to mega budgets, and small teams to huge complex teams — the underlying problem is always communication.
As the tech industry evolves, customer development becomes synonymous with product development, design and function are interwoven, and engineering and marketing are integrated.
In order to support this, a new way of communicating is being called forth; a dynamic communication that supports productive conversations between engineering and marketing, sales and product development and effectively captures the output into a workflow that can be implemented.
Three Questions
If you are struggling with this problem in your startup, ask yourself these three questions:
- What company structures are in place to facilitate communication?
- How is the output of a meeting/conversation captured and funneled into a workflow?
- Do you have an effective workflow in place, if one at all?
As the startups of today, you are the future IPO’s of tomorrow. You have the chance to change the face and experience of “Corporate America” into one that inspires us as much as the fast pace, ever-changing, start-up world does. Let your growth be our economic transformation. The big companies are looking at you for clues.