A small engineering team is like a small bathing suit – they lift and support each other, and get everything looking just right.

How PostHog Ships More as it Scales  

• Why Read:

  • This article provides a proven, scalable organizational framework for growing a startup's engineering team while preserving the agility and culture of a small, early-stage company.

• Featuring:

  • James Temperton (@jtemperton), Content Marketer at PostHog

• Link: 

  • “The magic of small engineering teams”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Implementing Small Engineering Teams:

  • Point: Organize your company into small, autonomous teams to maintain startup speed and culture as you scale.

  • "Our answer is small teams – speedy, innovative, and autonomous one-pizza teams where individuals can still have an outsized impact. They enable us to scale, while retaining the culture and speed of an early-stage startup."

• Keeping Teams Genuinely Small:

  • Point: Limit team size to 2-6 people to maintain agility and startup-like behavior.

  • "Two to six people is ideal. More than this and you have a department, which is what we're trying to avoid. Less than two people and, well, you don't have a team... The overall goal of small teams is to own an area of the product or company, and behave like an early-stage startup."

• Empowering Teams to Run Themselves:

  • Point: Give teams autonomy to manage their own processes and make decisions.

  • "Each small team runs its own retrospective and sprint each week, with notes taken and shared in GitHub for the entire company to see. Small teams also make the final call on which features get into production, with no need for external quality assurance or control. And they can merge whenever."

• Establishing Clear Leadership:

  • Point: Assign one leader per team, focusing on product performance rather than traditional management.

  • "Each small team has a team lead who is responsible for its performance. They're not always the most experienced person on the team – we prefer to choose the person best-suited to leading the product the team is working on. Because we're engineering-led, product teams are always led by an engineer."

• Defining Team Missions:

  • Point: Give each team its own mission that aligns with the company's overall goals.

  • "Regardless of size or scope, each team has its own mission that feeds into our overall company mission of equipping every developer to build successful products... As well as a main mission, each small team also sets: Long-term goals and key metrics, What features or processes they own, A target customer (they can be external or internal)"

• Maintaining Flexibility:

  • Point: Allow for team changes when necessary, but prioritize stability.

  • "We'd rather hire new people than keep moving people around to fill gaps. That said, we're happy for people to move between teams when needed, ideally no more often than every three to nine months."

• Addressing Tradeoffs:

  • Point: Recognize and mitigate potential issues like overlap and fuzzy ownership.

  • "Some overlap is inevitable, especially when teams work on features that are used across multiple products. We mitigate this by being aggressively transparent... If a product or project doesn't have a clear owner, our fuzzy ownership process encourages people to create a PR and find a solution."

Getting Started With Sales as a Founder

Why Read: 

• Learn how you as a Founder can effectively sell your product, rather than relying on hired salespeople.

Featuring:

• Pete Koomen (@koomen),  Group Partner, Y Combinator

• Link:

• “Enterprise Sales | Startup School”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

1. Founders should sell their product themselves initially, rather than hiring salespeople.

   • Quote: "If you're the founder of an early stage startup and you're building a product that you're hoping other businesses will buy... The bad news is that you're probably the only person capable of selling your product. That is, if you aren't able to sell your product yourself at first, chances are you're not going to be able to hire somebody else to do it for you."

2. Technical founders often make great salespeople due to their expertise and conviction.

   • Quote: "If you're a technical founder building a product you have several advantages that will give you a big leg up in selling. First you're an expert both in the problem you're solving and the product you're building. Second, you have conviction. You sincerely believe that your product will solve your customer's problem. Expertise and conviction are surprisingly important in sales."

3. Develop a clear sales hypothesis to guide your prospecting efforts.

   • Quote: "A good hypothesis makes prospecting easy by clarifying who you should be talking to. For example at optimizely our initial hypothesis was something like this, ‘marketers at small and medium Tech media and e-commerce companies want to run AB tests on their websites but they can't because off-the-shelf experimentation tools require users to write code. Otimizely will enable them to run AB tests without writing code.’"

4. Focus on generating inbound demand alongside outbound sales efforts.

   1. Quote: "The easiest way to get a meeting with a prospect is to get them to reach out to you. Even if you're planning on using a sales lead approach you should still do everything you can to generate inbound demand. Launch early and often. Create technical content like videos and blog posts that prospects can find while searching for a solution to their problem. Build self-served demos that people can share. Find online forums where your customers hang out and establish yourself as an expert by answering questions."

5. Avoid wasting time on prospects who are easy to talk to but unlikely to become customers.

   • Quote: "Many Founders start by talking to anyone who will take their call and the problem with this approach is that it selects for the people who are easiest to talk to not the people who will be be great customers. So if you're not disciplined about it you'll end up wasting all your time chasing bad customers that are easy to talk to."

6. Focus on asking questions during initial calls rather than pitching.

   • Quote: "Many Founders faceplant in the first call by diving straight into their pitch... In the real world, sales is not adversarial. It's about deeply understanding a customer's problem and helping them solve it. Great salespeople spend most of their time listening because that's the best way to understand someone's problem."

7. Structure product demos as a story that shows how your product solves the customer's problem.

   • Quote: "Resist the urge to take your audience on a feature tour where you walk from screen to screen showing them everything your product can do. Instead tell a story that shows exactly how your main character solves her problem."

8. Don't be afraid to charge higher prices, especially in the early stages.

   • Quote: "The pricing mistake that Founders make most often is charging too little for their product or even making it free in exchange for product feedback... One of the most surprising things I learned was that when a customer really wants your product it's hard to scare them away by quoting a price that's too high."

9. Understand and prepare for the customer's procurement process.

   • Quote: "The biggest mistake that I see Founders make at this stage is getting surprised and discovering that what they thought was a done deal is in fact not done at all and may take weeks or months of additional back and forth or fall through completely... The way to avoid getting surprised is once again to ask a lot of questions asking your prospect upfront how they buy software and who needs to sign off. It will give you a clear picture of the hurdles you're going to have to overcome in order to get a signature."

10. Take responsibility for the implementation and success of your product with customers.

    • Quote: "The single biggest mistake that Founders make is thinking that implementation is the customer's job... In reality our customers were buying a solution to a problem and all of the work required to get from product to solution was our responsibility."

11. Treat customer implementation like a high-priority internal project.

    • Quote: "The trick we learned was to treat the customer implementation the same way that we would a high priority project inside of our own company by project managing it so we put together a shared road map we made sure that every task headed owner we set up regular check-in meetings to hold everyone on our side and theirs accountable for getting it done."

12. Start selling and Develop a New Superpower.

    • Quote: "If you only remember one thing it should be this just get started. You'll make mistakes, but with enough attempts you'll figure it out and selling will start to feel natural pretty soon. You'll discover that you've acquired a new superpower. You'll find it's useful not only in getting customers and revenue but in fundraising and hiring too."

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