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I have been lucky enough to have the opportunity to work with a number of small businesses & startups across multiple industries. My inclusion to these businesses has been at a common point across the board which can be summed up with:
The business was trying to get to the next step.
This can be for multiple reasons – maybe the staff aren’t staying long, or the product can’t do what the customers need, the costs are getting out of control, or the business just doesn’t know what the next steps are or how to achieve it. One of these is probably even the reason you’re here. My role (regardless of title) is always to understand what the business (and it’s culture) is great at, where and why there’s a barrier to it’s success, and help it break through to make the business reach the next level. This is done by adjusting the product to suit the culture and skills of the business, while minimising the effect the concerns within the business are having on it. Why is this always so successful? It all comes back to an observation made at the beginning of the computing age.
Conway’s Law
You would have noticed this subconsciously with almost every business you have interacted with via their website, an online form, or maybe their app without specifically knowing it. It will affect how you see that business, you’ll have an idea of how it runs internally, and so on. So let’s look at what Conway’s Law is stated as:
[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?
To summarise, it means the way a business interacts internally is reflected within it’s products. If you think about a product you used recently – maybe you use Canva, or you’ve purchased from Amazon. You’ve got an Android or Apple iPhone. All of these products give hints to how the company works internally. That also means any customer of yours has the same insights into your business. Can your customers see you’ve plateaued? Absolutely. Can they see there’s a clock watcher in middle management? Maybe not directly, but they can see something’s up, and that makes them take a second look at your competitor.
What if it’s just company culture and people don’t like change, how is a business meant to get past the plateau, how can they grow if customers know what’s going on? The answer is to adjust the product itself.
How to continue the momentum & grow
95% of variation in the performance of a system is caused by the system itself; only 5% is caused by the people.
— W. Edwards Deming, The leader’s handbook: making things happen, getting things done
…people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence”: employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
— Laurence J. Peter, The Peter principle
…the difficulty faced by organizations, and in particular young companies such as start-ups, where one or more founders maintain disproportionate power and influence following the effective initial establishment of the organization, leading to a wide range of problems.