What can enterprises learn from start-ups
We look up to our elders for guidance, since they have more experience.
You must have heard this phrase, and that might hold true for a person’s life, but that isn’t the case in the professional world.
The long-standing and experienced enterprises of the world have been forced to learn a new way — The startup way.
But how are these small teams breaking all notions, and making the giants follow their footsteps instead of the other way round. It’s not that enterprises are failing, but startups have an unusually higher growth trajectory. And it makes one wonder, can their best practices be copied to existing enterprise models. Let’s discuss some of those best practices.
1. Lean methodology
While enterprises try to perfect a product before introducing it to the customer, startups work on a lean methodology. The concept works on building a MVP (Minimal Viable Product) based on the initial idea. That is run through customers for qualitative feedback while quantitative data is measured. Based on the learnings from the data, the idea is tweaked and accordingly changes are made in the product build. The cycle repeats to create the perfect product. By the time an enterprise launches their final product to the user, startups are at v5.0 of their product based on multiple cycles of customer feedbacks and insights.
2. Customer-centric
Enterprises try to build the best product possible as per their capabilities and R&D, while startups try to build the best product possible as per customer requirements and pain points. Startups would even pivot their product sometimes, based entirely on customer feedback. They make sure customer feedback is incorporated on every milestone in a product roadmap. In the beginning most startups treat their own employees (specially the new ones) as a customer, and ask them to share their feedback as a user. Building the product around a customer is something enterprises should replicate.
3. The 3Fs (Fail fast, Fail small, Fail forward)
“If you think about everything as an experiment, failure is not as scary.”
- Claire Vo, Vice President of Product, Optimizely
Startups work on what they call — a runway. Based on their funding they have a limited time to prove to their investors, customers, team, everyone involved, that they have a viable product, which would bring in more funds and increase their runway. Which is why they do not have the luxury to get comfortable.
This is why startups believe in failing fast — experiment rapidly, failing small — allocating minimal resources required to each experiment, and failing forward — learning from each mistake and improvising and taking the next steps based on their learnings.
4. Intrapreneurship
As an enterprise grows it becomes hard to keep track of individual employees. Success is measured on a team or sometimes on a department level. Individuals feel as if they are simply executing and completing their duties. If there ever was a sense of ownership, it starts to fade. Whereas, startups celebrate individual members for their achievements and trust them to lead projects from start to finish, and that sense of ownership drives them to make their project successful.
5. Losing the meeting fever
Look at your calendar for the week, how many meetings do you see? Especially due to the virtual work environment we all are moving towards, and have adapted to, even quick chats have turned into 15–30 minute meetings. We all have attended meetings with way too many people in it for anything to be solved. And when you leave, you wonder — “An email would have sufficed.”
Startups ensure meetings take a minimum amount of time in an employee’s workday by enabling 1–1 communication using technology such as Slack or Teams, or adding their comments directly to a documentation portal like Confluence or Notion. Some startups even have dedicated “No-Meeting-Days”, when employees have the entire day to finish their projects without having to attend meetings.
6. Continuous learning
Enterprises provide their employees with book rentals and course discounts but rarely force anyone to learn new skills. Till the time someone is performing their job as per expectations, they are left undisturbed. On the other hand, startups are constantly collaborating and pushing boundaries with their employees. Whenever they see someone getting comfortable, they either force employees to take on newer responsibilities which would call for more learning, or they shuffle entire roles to expose employees to new departments and knowledge.
7. Collaboration
Now you might think collaboration is something that is followed across the industry, regardless of the company size, but the level of information sharing is very different for enterprises and startups. While in an enterprise, team members or sometimes even individual teams collaborate amongst themselves, in a startup everyone from a CEO to an intern are working together. Following a flat hierarchy, everyone in a startup is aware of everything that goes around in every team of the company, thanks to monthly interactive events like Town Halls where every team presents a quick update on their progress and roadmap. Other than collaborating with employees, startups even collaborate with their own customers, communities, universities, and private firms on various projects.
At the end of the day whether enterprises learn from startups is up to them, since they have been running successful businesses for decades themselves. But if they want to move out of the maturity phase and back into the growth stage, startups offer these proven best practices to shake things up.
