How High-Growth Tech Companies Scale Culture & Process

Nicholas Goubert, Alan Hicks, Robbie Tilleard, Mihaela Draghici at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZlH4g3jABA

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introductions and growth trajectories

[00:00:00] Mihaela: Good morning. Are we all set? We're all set, I think so. Hello everyone, I'm Mihaela Draghici. I am trying to be your moderator today. I am an associate director at the software development center of Volkswagen Digital Solutions in Portugal. Yes, I've come all the way from Lisbon. So today we're going to explore, together with Nicholas, Alan and Robbie, a bit more about people, processes, structure and culture, and how these evolve in high growth startups. And I guess to get us started, I would like to ask you guys to introduce yourselves, tell us a bit more about your companies and your growth trajectory so far. Who wants to go first? Nicholas?

[00:00:48] Nicholas: Yeah sure, go ahead. Morning everybody. I didn't come as far as from Lisbon, but from Barcelona, so similar. I'm the product officer at Utopia Music, so I support the product and the design and product operation teams at Utopia. Utopia is a music fintech company, and what we are trying to do with Utopia is what we call close the data gap in the music industry, to become the back end for the music industry. Without going into detail, the music industry as it functions today has some data issues, siloed problems with licensing and all that, and we are on a journey of helping the creator by fixing that, and using technology to provide the right services to the whole ecosystem within the music industry.

[00:01:44] Nicholas: And in terms of growth, I joined about a year ago, and if you look at growth from an employee perspective, we are on a 10x per year in terms of growth. Just to give you an idea, when I joined we were a little bit above 100 people, now we are about 10x that. So that's the size of the growth. Definitely an interesting topic, with a lot of complexity to deal with and a lot of excitement, so very happy to discuss that.

[00:02:15] Robbie: Thank you. I'm Robbie, I'm a product director at Multiverse. At Multiverse we're trying to create alternative pathways to make sure we can create the future leaders of tomorrow, and we do that via high-tech apprenticeships. Think of things like, I'm sure a lot of you in the room want more software engineers, more data scientists. We can actually help you attract that talent and train them over time. And in terms of scaling, since 2020 we've increased from about 250 employees to almost 850 today, so huge growth. We did our Series C and Series D in the space of 12 months, with the Series D raising about 220 million to make us the UK's first edtech unicorn, so we're worth about 1.7 billion. But obviously that's happened at a rapid pace as well.

[00:03:12] Alan: Thank you. Hi everybody, so I'm Alan, I'm the CTO at Manna Drone Delivery, and we are, what we say, we're a drone delivery business, and we're based here in Ireland, so I didn't have to travel too far. Unfortunately you're used to the weather here. Manna, we've been in business since 2019, and in terms of our scale story, we started with four people and we're now just over 100 people, so we've scaled quite rapidly in that short amount of time. And previous to Manna I actually worked for CarTrawler, where I started when there were 20 employees and we scaled that business to 500, so I'll probably lean into some of that CarTrawler story later on when we're talking.

[00:03:56] Mihaela: You guys definitely have a lot of stuff to share there. And actually, to jump straight in and give a bit of context as well: Volkswagen Digital Solutions in Portugal was founded back in 2018. We started with a handful of people, started massively hiring, with the purpose of working on digital products for the Volkswagen Group, and within the last three years we grew to a few hundreds. We have three different tech units, one of them being the software development center that I'm part of as well.

[00:04:27] Mihaela: One of the challenges we've had over time was around team structures. In the software development center we started off with a flat hierarchy. We have cross-functional product teams, there are no hierarchy levels, everyone is at the same level, different seniority levels and expertise. However, over time, as the teams grow, it starts getting a bit confusing who's responsible for what, who is making decisions, how to align the product teams, dependencies, priorities and so on, who is the person taking the responsibility, considering we wanted to empower everyone to make decisions and take ownership on the product. And actually, shifting to that and asking you guys regarding the challenges you've had around team structures and how you've overcome those. Would you like to start, Alan?

Going from wearing many hats to going deep

[00:05:23] Alan: Yeah sure. I think it's a huge challenge, and it's a huge challenge because you're dealing with people. Scaling the business is relatively easy from the technology side. It's actually the people side that build that technology where the complications come in. And what I've found in my experience is that transparency with people is the best thing. And sometimes hard decisions need to be made, so unfortunately the team that you start a business with is not necessarily the team that is the right team to scale the business, because you need different sets of characteristics in those people. When you're starting a business you need people that will wear multiple hats, that will get their hands dirty, that'll get involved in everything, that feel ownership of everything.

[00:06:09] Alan: And if you then grow a 20-person team that have those capabilities into a 100 person team, you don't need everybody on a 100 person team to own everything, to wear multiple hats. You need them to stay very focused. So you need to change people from being very, very wide across things into being very deep, and I think it's a really hard transition for people to make, to go from "I own everything, I can touch everything, I can see everything" into "I only own this piece specifically."

[00:06:41] Alan: And I failed at this in the past. It's how do you explain to people that actually going deep at this point in time is really, really important for the product, for the business, and it's not a narrowing of ownership, of area, of kudos. It's actually the need for the business. And that's the tricky thing, is how you manage people's feelings through that.

[00:07:12] Robbie: Yeah, I was actually interested in the room, what size companies people are. So put your hand up if you're like less than 10 people in your company. Not many. So less than say 100. Okay. All right, then maybe 100 to a thousand. Okay. And then a thousand plus, say. All right.

[00:07:39] Robbie: So it seems like most people are actually experiencing a bunch of the challenges that we're discussing. We're not talking about the less than 10 startups, which I might sometimes call like the home kitchen. Basically everyone's throwing in, everyone can do anything, and it's more about getting that output of the family meal. We're more talking about how do you make ten thousand burgers in one day. You can't do that in a home kitchen any more. In an extreme case you're looking at the McDonald's kind of assembly line approach. That's obviously not where you want to go if you're a creative, innovative company, but you're obviously going to have to adapt some of those practices in order to scale, because some of those things really work.

[00:08:19] Robbie: And so that's really about what can you understand, almost what Rory was talking about earlier in the day: what are the bits that you can really make sure you understand the system and process for, nail it, and then make sure your teams are doing that, and then where do you need to actually really focus on where you can innovate and adapt over time? I think this is a really big challenge around how do you actually think about those demands. So at Multiverse at the moment it's a lot about where are our crossovers in terms of our domains, where are the crossovers in terms of the code base, in terms of the design. All of this is an ongoing challenge around how do we build a better and more scalable product over time.

[00:09:04] Robbie: And some of the solutions to this are the simple ones: communication, making sure you're transparent about what you're working on, having ways to actually do that. But then I guess there are also things that you want to make sure you protect over time as well. So just three quick ideas for thinking about where your highest leverage points are as you scale. Onboarding sometimes is neglected, but that's always going to have to be one of the major pieces, and maybe you should even consider re-onboarding, so those people who joined in the first 10 employees should actually go to the onboarding when you're 500 employees and understand how the business has changed.

[00:09:41] Robbie: Think about what rituals you use. Do you have all hands every week? Do you meet somewhere once a year? What other rituals do you really drive in the company? And then I guess thirdly, thinking about feedback as well, across your departments, because you're going to have a lot of people now. How are you providing feedback between departments? How are you providing feedback up and down your levels? You should spend a lot of time thinking about that, because otherwise that's when you get stuck and silos start to be created. And in terms of feedback as well, thinking about users finally as well, because that should be driving a lot of the structure of your organization. It should really be ultimately focused on what those user problems are. So that's just a few ideas, I guess, from the challenges that we're facing at the moment.

Preserving culture and communicating in hyperscale

[00:10:29] Nicholas: Thank you. I think a lot of things have been said. We're dealing with people, it's complicated. Technology can also be complicated to scale sometimes, especially when you go fast. We grew through a mix of programmatic M&A and organic, so it creates some additional level of complexity. In terms of culture, I think culture is the important piece, I think you've been touching on that. So preserving the culture and nurturing the culture when you grow is important. Communication, definitely, and a lot of clarity: the bigger you become, the more clear you need to be, because you don't have this kitchen conversation. It's impossible to put a thousand people in the kitchen over coffee and talk about everything.

[00:11:10] Nicholas: There's also FOMO that you need to manage. All of a sudden, your first meeting that you have when you're 20 is between 20 people max. If you are a thousand and you do an all hands, you will never be able to go deep. And the other thing is, in hyperscale you always need to think that half of the company is new and doesn't understand what you're doing. So even communication is complicated, because it's always restarting from scratch, and for some people it's repetition and for others it's just brand new, so you need to manage that.

[00:11:44] Nicholas: So it's very important, I think, to partner with your people and culture team. That will help you with that and with the communication. One thing we do, for example, is we create communities, so we have a product community where the new people have an onboarding buddy system and all that to help them get into the groove, understand how we work. But education is repetition, right? So you keep repeating, repeating, which is a great exercise in terms of refining your strategy, as you were saying. What are your levers, how do you do that, because it takes time to figure them out and they evolve over time.

[00:12:16] Nicholas: Another thing maybe we should discuss is that the economic environment has changed pretty drastically recently, so for a pure growth company it's a little bit of soul-searching. It's like, is growth still relevant, or how do you balance growth and profitability? So your message also changes. And the last point I would like to also make is that the only thing that is constant is going to be change anyway. So even before onboarding, and here again close collaboration with your people and culture team, it's like who are the right people to bring on board, who have the right mindset.

[00:12:51] Nicholas: So I think it's also very important, culture, mindset. There's a thing that is always very interesting: when you hire someone, you need to make sure that in six months they're ready to change job, give away their Lego, and then help someone else. So it's all a combination. If you think about that, it's about the buddy system, so someone who has been there six months can also tell the war stories a little bit to the new people who are joining. You also do that when you interview. You need a certain kind of people, and of course you need diversity, but you're looking for a certain type of mindset. So make sure you bring on board the right people, make sure you nurture the culture, make sure you keep repeating, refining. Feedback is very interesting, and it's becoming way, way more difficult when you are a big company to make sure that everybody understands they're contributing to the journey.

[00:13:43] Nicholas: So linking that to what was shared in a previous session, I think one thing that is extremely interesting is that your strategy and your company vision need to become clearer and clearer as you grow. You can afford to pivot, you can afford little changes and little refinements when you're a small company. When you're a big one, it's a big boat that you have to ship. So refine that, and find systems and processes to bring everybody on the journey. But there's no silver bullet. You need to try different things, and being a little bit biased in my approach, I look at everything as a product, so try things, iterate, try things in little pockets in the company, and then if it works just deploy that across the whole company and then iterate. So it's an ongoing journey, it's never going to be finished.

[00:14:32] Mihaela: Yeah, I am totally aligned with that, actually, and I was thinking about the same in our case as well, talking about addressing the team, the company, the culture as our product, and looking at iterations and constant evolution and constant adaptability. And talking about the change, even in our case at some point we realized, like, something has to change. We've been working like this for a few years now but it's clear there's room for improvement. And we spent some time trying to figure out how to approach that, and we actually said, why don't we just apply the methodologies we apply for building our products into figuring out how to handle our teams? And we actually did a discovery and framing phase this summer and asked our teams and our employees what they feel about the office, the culture, the products they work on, the direction we're going in, what they would like to have changed, what in the processes, what in the structure, if anything to be added or removed.

When is the right time to add or change a process

[00:15:34] Mihaela: And actually that takes me to another question regarding processes, and at which point in the growth, in the evolution, is it the right time to add processes, remove processes, change them? Nicholas, would you like to start?

[00:15:55] Nicholas: Yeah, sure. The processes are different, but you always need processes. You don't start off with processes, right, but even then it depends what you call a process. We can go philosophical on that, but I think process is just part of the journey. You're going to have processes along the whole journey. Just talk about onboarding for example, which I think is on point. If you're a 10 people company, onboarding is fairly easy. You're not going to have everybody in the hiring or onboarding process, but even if you want a new joiner to meet with everybody, just have dinner, 10 on the table, manageable. A thousand people, a bit more complicated.

[00:16:40] Nicholas: And if you onboard 100 people every month, you really need a process that is very different. That's not something that you're going to handcraft. So I think your processes evolve at the same pace as your company and you just need to iterate on them. Some are going to become completely obsolete in three months, some are going to be durable and you're going to iterate on them. So for me the easy answer is, I know process is kind of a dirty word that people don't want to hear about, but there's always a process, whether it's written or not written, or it's just an instinct and you do it. That's the way we operate as humans. Chaos is great, but even in the creativity or in the creation phase, this is a process. It might be different from yours, might be different from mine. My process may be in the shower or maybe somewhere else.

[00:17:28] Nicholas: But I think process is not a dirty word. Process helps us get where we want to go. It's necessary. It can be actually very, very good. Just imagine running a company, or running a product team, whatever, without process. It's just impossible. And we're all working in some kind of agile mode, right? So how can we hear process is bad but at the same time we are following a methodology[?]. I believe it's just a question of, process should not kill the creativity and all that. So you need to look at your process and apply it. Once again it sounds like a broken record, but that's a product. Your process is a product. Make sure it's relevant for your user, make sure you iterate on it, and that you document it, and when it's time to put it on ice and move to a new one, just do that.

[00:18:24] Alan: Thank you. Yeah, exactly. I was literally, when you started, there was, you always need process. Anybody who comes along and says this is the process that's going to last us for the next five years, it's like, no, it might last us for the next three months. It's a bit like the Golden Gate Bridge. As soon as you've rolled out a process you're starting again, or you're iterating, or you're changing it, and it's whatever works at the time, because if you suddenly scale or you suddenly have different demands on a project. Covid was a great example. That was about a year after we started the business and we were all working in an incubation office, all together, and we could chat, and it was a process but it wasn't a formal process. And then suddenly nobody saw each other, and obviously we were on Slack and things but it wasn't the same. And we very quickly set up a process to say let's have three stand-ups a week and just keep in touch. And the first few, there wasn't much to talk about, and then you get into a rhythm, and that's a process that we're still running today.

[00:19:29] Alan: So I think situations will drive process changes, and it may work or it may not work. There's plenty of things we've done, like we've tried five minutes at the end of the day and it just didn't work for us, so we just got rid of it. But it's just a constant wheel turning, and the more people you can involve in the process change... obviously a ten thousand people company, it gets very, very difficult, but I think if you're still 100 people, the more open you are to say we don't know if this is going to work or not work, but let's all try it together. Because if people are part of the change... nobody likes change unless they're the one driving the change. So it's a degree of honesty as well, right? It's like, we're not sure we got it right, but we're going to try and see if it works.

Process needs rebranding

[00:20:19] Robbie: Well, I think what we've discovered is process needs rebranding. So maybe this is a challenge for everyone in the room. Maybe we should call it structure, maybe we should call it principles. Structure's going to work. Yeah, it was a brainstorming. But so yes, if you look at the highest performing teams across any industry, I don't know, I always look at The Daily Show as a comedy, pick your favorite sports team, the original Skunk Works unit by Lockheed Martin, all of them share structure, and they understand that that structure is actually what drives freedom ultimately, because that's what we need for creativity. You don't want to be focused on what exactly is going to come next, you should have a sensible approach.

[00:21:00] Robbie: And that's actually what we call it at Multiverse. We call them sensible defaults within our team. So default is actually a very particular word that we use, and that's because we want to allow freedom to the teams, and autonomy within teams to divert from those defaults as well, because then, to your point, they experiment, they see what works, and then they can share that with other teams. But we actually have a set of, you know, principles, structure, process, whatever we want to call it, that underlines what our product teams are doing, which means everyone has at least an idea, a roadmap, for what they should be doing, and then they can choose to take the different routes that they want to take on the way.

[00:21:41] Mihaela: Thank you. That's actually what we were discussing about last week, and I was thinking about it as guidelines. So you have some sort of direction, you have some sort of structure in which you can still explore and experiment to see what works best in a specific case. We still have a few minutes left and I think we should open it up to questions from the public, if you guys agree. Let's explore if there are any questions out there. It's really hard to see if there are any hands raised, because the light is very bright here. Yes. There's a microphone going around, thank you.

Q&A: how do you measure whether a new process works

[00:22:28] Audience: So, about to explore a new process in small teams: how would you measure success of the new processes you're starting, or introducing to the teams? Thanks.

[00:22:46] Alan: Hello. Yeah, good question. I think sometimes it's easy to measure success, if there's some metrics that you can apply, tickets closed or anything, but that's generally a terrible measure of success, because not all tickets are equal. To me it's more about, as a leader, how you can see the team reacting to the process, and are they engaged in it or are they not engaged. And it can be intangible or it can be very tangible, because typically a process comes in and there's a big goal, a milestone kind of in the near future, and everybody goes, oh, this isn't working, we've got to change something quickly and build a bit of momentum, and people see processes building momentum to getting this big milestone done.

[00:23:33] Alan: And sometimes you say, well, the milestone was done, that's great, the process must work. But if you then step back and look at the team and they're jaded and not engaged, you might say, well, it works in one way, in that the metrics are all good, we delivered, but the team aren't ready to deliver again because they need a break. So there's no magic bullet to answer, and I suspect you knew that when you asked the question. But it's more, I think you just have to look at both sides of, did we get the job done, metrics etc., and how did the team feel, and a measure of happiness. And there's loads of ways you could do that, and there's probably an inventive business that all these creative people in the room could think of, to measure happiness on a team.

[00:24:17] Robbie: That used to be my job, so there you go. It turns out there is decades of psychological research which is about how do you think about happiness, and that's not hedonic happiness, that's eudaimonic happiness, fulfillment over time and an actual sense of purpose. And that's exactly what drives it. So things like autonomy, mastery, belonging in your team, and ultimately purpose as well. Those are the things that you really need to pass through the filter of: yes, you want those outcomes, but are you also contributing to autonomy, mastery, belonging, purpose within the team, because that's what's going to make a team productive and happy over time.

[00:25:00] Nicholas: Yeah, I think most of it has been said. I'm a big believer that the team is the one who knows exactly what works and what doesn't work. So then you need to find, it's always the same thing, you need to find the right balance between bottom up and top down. And I think in that case, as I say, everything is going to change, but the team knows what they need to achieve, how they need to get there. It's about health of the team. And you need to take into account also, I think, that the amount you're going to get involved in defining these metrics depends also on the maturity of the team. We all know it takes quite a bit of time for a team to get into a jive and get there. So if it's a very early stage team that just got together, you need also to cut them some slack, and that's part of management.

[00:25:45] Nicholas: But I'm a big advocate of the decision being made at the level of the team, because they know better. It's just a question of making sure there's a leader there, we help them get there and help facilitate. And then you can also pair them with teams who I've seen have gone through that journey, and they're not necessarily going to use the same metrics, but they can have the conversation with people who've been there and gone across all that journey. And then if you don't have it internally you can also bring external people who can help them reflect and be part of that reflection.

[00:26:21] Nicholas: I think if you own a team, it's very important for a team to own what they need to deliver, and I think accountability, ownership, is also about defining your metrics and how you're going to get there. And every team is going to be slightly different. There's a lot of theory around what is a good performing team, but going back to what we were saying at the beginning, it's people, right? So it's going to be very different from one team to another. So you need to have principles and then leave room for experimentation, and room for, yeah, adapt yourself to the team and adapt the processes to the team as well. So it's always a balance there, I think.

[00:26:59] Mihaela: So it comes down to empowering the team to measure and decide on what works best, but at the same time we still need to have those structures and processes in place so that the team can operate.

[00:27:14] Nicholas: I think so, and of course we should take also, there's a different lens depending on where you are. If you're firefighting, or if you have a lot of time and you're on an easier journey. So depending on what you want to achieve, time pressure or this kind of thing, you might be more involved and more prescriptive. And there's also all these external elements you need to take into account. Sometimes we all want to have empowered teams and all that, and sometimes you need to influence that a little bit so that at some point they can be empowered. Sometimes you need to get them out of the issue and speed up the process, so that you build time for that team to grow and then to be independent.

[00:27:57] Nicholas: It's also very important, I think, especially at the beginning of the formation of the team, to help them to get some wins under their belt. So you might be a little bit more prescriptive here, and then you let them fly. So, without going all the way to say it's like children's education, at some point they need to try as much, but you need to put some guardrails. You want a kid to play in the kitchen, you don't want a kid to play with, like, I don't know, super warm still[?] or something like that. So that's the balance you need to find, and most of the time, to be honest, you get it wrong the first time and you just learn. So it's also an iteration.

Final thoughts

[00:28:36] Mihaela: Okay, got it. Thank you very much. Before we wrap up, any final remarks that you would like to, any final thoughts you'd like to share?

[00:28:44] Alan: Yeah, I mean, I think, when I read the topic for the panel, I think the biggest thing for me is that the thing that affects scale of a business is actually individuals' ego. And I think it's really, really important that leaders can explain how ego is not important, and not everything. But if you've got people on the team, or if you are the person on a team, don't let your ego get in the way of scaling a great business, because what you find is people try and protect themselves so much that they won't work with anybody, and that's the most damaging thing to scale.

[00:29:24] Robbie: Thank you. I mean, maybe I'll just repeat: high performing teams, you want to really focus on how do you create autonomy, how do you drive mastery, and how do you also have that sense of belonging and purpose in a team. And if you get that right, people will talk about that team for their lives, and it also will scale if you get it right.

[00:29:49] Nicholas: Yeah. Scale is complicated. Every kind of scale is difficult. Hyperscale is not necessarily more difficult than just normal scaling, and we need to define what is normal scaling. It's a nice balance between difficult but exciting. So I think everybody, you get excited by a hard problem to solve, and as long as you have the playground to try, it's an interesting journey. So I would encourage everybody who has not yet tried hyperscale to just give it a try. It's pretty fun, exhausting at some point, but you learn a lot. It's also learning on steroids. You have to be quick, you have to learn a lot, so it's a super interesting personal growth experience, I think.

[00:30:32] Robbie: And I guess we're all hiring.

[00:30:37] Nicholas: Yeah, we're also all hiring, but that's not even the point. I think at some point it's also a journey, and besides the company you work with and all that, we're all people, going back to that. And I think there's nothing more exciting than continuous learning and growing, and it's just a very nice playground, wherever you are. Hyperscale is super fun, and super exhausting, but it's very good to be up for that challenge.

[00:31:03] Mihaela: Cool, thank you so much guys, thank you very much. I hope you all learned something insightful today, and I guess we're all available for conversations off stage throughout the event today. So thank you very much, have a lovely day everyone. Thank you.