Thread by @eisabai

If you have unlimited free talent, how would you design your organisation for your tech startup? #startup #scale #chieftechnologyofficer #cto #founder #techleadership #productmanagement

Whether I’ve got unlimited free talent or not, I’d first think about roadmap / goals before designing my org for a tech startup.

Before you say a roadmap is too low-level details, hear me out. The roadmap is the magic that transforms vision to action.

Ask yourself, what kind of work will need to be done in the next six months to eighteen months for the organization.

You might think it’s a bit short-sighted to be thinking ahead only for the next one and a half years, but the truth of the matter is that the technology landscape is changing at a rapid rate.

If you plan and over-optimize for something that is so far away, you might struggle to build an organization that can execute and deliver on immediate goals.

Besides, it’s not like you will not be reviewing your organization structure regularly. Creating and managing a tech organization is never a one-off event; you will constantly be reviewing and optimizing your set up to meet the needs of the business.

With that in mind, think about the business goals that your organization needs to deliver and whether they are project-based or discovery-based.

A project-based work usually consists of of work where you already have a good idea about what needs to be done. For example, rewriting your software to work on a different operating system.

Discovery-based work are usually those ideas that your company believes in but are yet to be validated. For example, a shiny new feature that will potentially solve a pain-point that customers have.

The reason why it’s important to understand the type of work coming up is that different kinds of people thrive in different environments and knowing the answer to this will help you find the right people with the right characteristics.

You can read my recommendation on medium.com/swlh/five-area…