Onboarding and Managing Your Startup Team
As the startup world moved from the 3 dudes in a garage “wearing multiple hats” concept to the remote async setup of experts on-demand, the onboarding and team management processes need to keep up. Read on to stay on track.
Tools & Processes from Day One
As your team members are not wearing multiple hats but rather offer highly niched down and specialized services (fx product marketing for product led B2C early stage gen AI app) and also working on a part-time / on-demand / fractional arrangement with you, chances are your team is rather big even in the early days! That’s why it’s crucial you introduce the collaboration tools from the very beginning, at least something from communication (Slack/Discord) and a place for task prioritization and progress tracking (Trello, ClickUp, Jira etc.). In addition, don’t expect your global team of fractional experts to be available 9-5 in your TZ, but rather introduce the regular cadence (like weekly team call slot) so that people can plan their time. Make sure everybody understands the workflow (specs, planning, execution, review etc.) and updates the task board daily. I can also highly recommend standup bot for Slack, a great way to set your focus for the day and have the team activities and potential blockers at a glance.
Kick-Off Resources
Expertise on-demand also means frequent onboarding. In order to have your new members hit the ground running (which is especially crucial for short-term arrangements) and avoid the interruption of the core team with too many questions, make sure you have good kick-off resources (docs, videos) explaining your project, processes, tools used.
The Async Collab
As you’re not sharing a garage, and probably not even the time zone, make sure your team members are not getting blocked by waiting for somebody to come online. It’s crucial to place any question/comment/info in context (fx Trello card or Jira issue) and not let it get buried in a chat. Another essential practice is the dual-track workflow: make sure the specs for the next iteration (marketing campaign, dev sprint etc) are ready prior to the planning meeting, so that the team can analyze, prepare questions and get their answers before the execution time is on. That way you avoid blockers of the pending info type due to somebody being offline.
Team Work Retrospective
A practice from Scrum, but applies to any type of iteration. Basically a moment where everybody can share where they see the space for improvement in the team work processes and also what went really well and should stay. The leader is there to make sure it gets turned into actionables and implemented. Examples: user story too big to accurately estimate, mockups not clear without videos, workflow automation incorrect etc. If your team is shy, tools like IdeaBoardz provide a good way for anonymous contribution.
Ready to onboard your team and start creating? Any questions, ping over here!