What makes managing early-stage startup teams so hard?
FTEs + contractors + agencies + fractional team members = a management mess. Why?
The makeup of early-stage startup teams can look a lot different than their scale-up or corporate counterparts. In the beginning days when resources are tight and preciously allocated on a need-this-now basis, likely, a startup isn’t full of FTEs in functional roles. More often, you’ll find a mix of a few key FTEs, generalist or specialist cofounders, fractional resources, consultants, and agencies to round out the builders getting things off the ground.
This strategy is a beneficial one. By leveraging the many modern ways to build out your team, you’ll look around and find it is full of integral resources who can produce the required output based on your startup’s stage-specific needs.
The problem however comes from the fact that the communication, knowledge, and work management for these resources is often different. Agencies might require you to work within their tool infrastructures. Fractional resources might have access to some tools but not others due to their short-term nature. FTEs might not know all of the part-timers.
This gets messy quickly. You’ll be spending your time keeping all of your resources up to date while feeling like you don’t actually have the team that’s “in it” with you. Language matters, and you’ll interpret having “fractional” team members like you’re getting less than. You’ll bring yourself and your team into a mental space of scarcity, where it seems like you’ll never have enough time, structure, or resources to succeed.
how DO you bring order to the chaos of managing different profiles of people in your org to minimize the headache of working on work?
Design your startup’s internal product management system, then hold all team members to it.
Why This Works
With every addition to your team, complexity in communication and management doesn’t just increase but exponentially increases. If you give autonomy to each partner or person’s resources to work in their system of preference, you’ll not only be managing people in different work structures but all of the microsystems and habits that come along with them. Information will fall into the void. Who knows the answer to what? Where are decisions being made? No one knows! Establishing precedents and keeping them consistent will make it feel like you’re all on the same team, which will go a very long way in bringing order to startup chaos.
Why Do This Now
How you operate becomes your company’s IP, the secret sauce. Think about it — most service businesses don’t scale. Why? “They’re too bespoke. Too much variability.” Want to scale something? Productize it. The internal operations of a scale-up are simply a productized service, the service being the team members who work in service of the business. As you grow and start to add more FTEs to your team and leverage fewer outside resources, you’ll find you’ve already built the necessary infrastructure for scale. Of course, these systems will need to be morphed and spruced up over time, but implementing and adopting these structures and calling them your own brings efficiency into your cultural DNA.
how We Do: How to manage a diverse team structure.
In short, design your systems for team members to clearly outline work habits consistently, and where you can support personalization.
Tools 🛠️
Communications management
Slack or Teams can be a great place to keep all chatter in one place.
Keep agency and contractor updates out of email if possible. Can this be documented in your knowledge or work management tools so you’re not translating updates to work? This will also make the work easier to reference later when that agency or contractor is no longer with your company or if the employee who managed the relationship has transitioned out.
Create communication channels for each project or area of work to keep conversations out of direct messages. That way, you’re reducing the remote game of telephone while progressing work together.
Knowledge management
Whatever work is produced shouldn’t fall into external Excel sheets, Google Docs, or Figma files via email. Direct all team members, both internally and externally, to migrate their work to the knowledge management tool of the team’s choosing (Notion, SOPs in a Google Doc). This can prevent fragmented information that’s hard to find for the people who need it.
Work management
Pick a work management tool and make sure everyone who is contributing to company goals maintains high-level updates on their projects. Do you use Monday.com but your marketing agency uses ClickUp? Make sure they can migrate the high-level work over to Monday so that progress is transparent to the rest of the team.
Invest in your work management tool’s Bird's Eye View feature (Like Asana’s Portfolios). This can give you a good sense of what’s being worked on at a glance.
Rules (Process) 📝
Set alignment meetings for all team members on a weekly or monthly cadence, depending on team culture. All contributors need an opportunity to share what they’re seeing.
Establish consistent team rituals around maintaining workflow and knowledge management tools. Are you as a founder/founders setting the course for the week on Mondays? Fridays? For course-setting the team's next milestone, ensure everyone has given you their updates and input in advance so you have all the information you need.
People 🫶
For both short-term and long-term team members, treat onboarding as an opportunity for expectation alignment and culture-setting. Even your content creator needs to understand how everyone works, who does what, and what you’re working towards. It will speed up your team’s work and efficiency as they all have a clear sense of what’s being achieved and how.
Consider everyone working on or in the business as part of the team, regardless of length and structure. If they’re contributing as the water boy or star quarterback, everyone plays an essential part. Treating everyone as such will go far beyond gifts of equity.
Acknowledge where great ideas and work are coming from.
Give all team members an opportunity to collaborate. When an agency or part-time contractor brings fresh experience into your organization, they can get you out of pigeon-holed thinking and create space for ideas and new ways of doing.
Take It Up A Level
Using AI to Improve how You Do:
Wherever able, have a shared company-wide account with ChatGPT so you can share a long list of searches from everyone in the organization.
Develop SOPs and share best practices on leveraging AI so that your team is using AI consistently and efficiently.
Going deeper on what you know
Build a network map to outline relationships of influence within the organization.
Actually Actionable
Nice article. Now what?
We’ve taken the ideas above and put them into a summary to take to your team, with key contact info for each of the resources provided within.
Deep Work Sessions
Session 1: (45 min)
Clearly outline all team members including:
Roles (even if loosely defined)
Key projects owned
Working hours
Time zone
Determine upcoming end-of-contract dates and schedule reminders for effective offboarding as needed
Session 2: (60 min)
Create centralizing account management (i.e. founder@ or accounts @) to control access and easily on/off-board team members
Creating dedicated comms channels for key projects, noting how each channel should be managed and used
Rollout
Send a communication to your team including:
Outline of all team members:
Clearly outline systems:
Team’s knowledge management tool
Team’s work management tool
Comms channels and how to use them
Determine cadence to update the team on changes on the above (and set a cal reminder to stick to it!)
Managing early-stage startup teams can be challenging due to the diverse composition of team members. However, it's a fallacy to think that you need only full-time employees to successfully grow your early-stage startup. By designing infrastructures and internal product management, you can ensure your team finds cohesive success by creating consistency, improving communication, and fostering a sense of unity. Implementing effective tools for communication, knowledge management, and work management, setting clear rules and processes, and valuing the contribution of all team members can further enhance team cohesion and efficiency. This unlocks an organization that deploys the people, tools, and systems that fit its needs by leveraging the future of work, untangling the early days, and mixing and matching the people you need to find growth and success.
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Writer: Britt