Team Integrity Is Key In The Long Run

I once had a client who came to me with a very general request to help their company with the product development process and implement some day-to-day practices to improve visibility and speed product releases.

When I went deep into the project and analyzed the existing problems, I found a very sad but essential reason why the owners felt the product development was ineffective and broken.

Some key employees and co-founders had a very different vision of how the startup needed to grow and what they needed to do in their roles. Lack of documentation, disorganized development process, bugs, etc. - None of this was a real problem just symptoms of fundamental core team misunderstanding.

I noticed this and started having tough conversations with the founder and his team to fix this breach. I experienced the same problem at my startup before and understand the consequences.

When the early team disagrees with the vision and motivation, it always leads to very hard decisions, people leaving, or even the death of a startup.

So, what exactly is happening, and how to detect this problem:

1. Those who must drive the execution stop doing it or slowing down.
2. Conflicts happen more often and it becomes hard to solve them.
3. Fighting for decisions and hogging the blanket up.
4. People start working poorly even when the project is in a good state.
5. Your startup going to fail.

Don’t wait for 5, talk to your co-founders and teammates about what they do not like. One day I heard that the co-founder realized that he wanted to launch a company only as a single founder, there was no compromise solution for it. But it’s important to know about things like this as soon as possible.

Integrity is important in the long run. You can have a pretty small team, but grow faster than a well-funded larger company "just" because the co-founders and teammates are a perfect fit. Hire slow, fire fast - this idea works. The early partners are the most important people, you cannot make mistakes here.

But shit happens and probably you will be needed to make a taught decision if it's happened, even if it means leaving someone from the co-founders. It's still better than dead.

Here are simple points to ensure that you have a good fit with your co-founders and team:

1. Talk about the underlying motivation to build exactly your product and company.
2. Arrange your life values, especially your view on business.
3. Discuss everyone's expectations.
4. Talk about good and bad scenarios.
5. Define the timing for milestones and when to come back to this discussion.
6. Write a project manifest document with a statement, goals, and other essential things of your startup to align the vision.

Keep the health of your team relations. It’s a fundament of continuous growth.