Minimum Viable Process
Hi! I’m Molly. I write about what it actually takes to lead inside growing, changing companies: the frameworks that help, the honest truth about what it feels like, and the messy work of shaping a career that actually fits.
Lessons is where those ideas live — both the writing and the conversations around it. (If you want to learn more about how Lessons and the community work, you can read more here.)
I’ve been talking to a few people lately about Process. As you start to grow the number of employees in a startup, adding process can be one of the scariest things — how much is too much? how much is not enough? can process kill your culture? can it kill your speed? how do you know when to take it away?
First, since we all know I hate Black Hole Words, let’s define “process”. What I mean is creating a system for doing something or getting things done that generally makes things either more efficient, more transparent, or more fair. Process can show up in the form of recurring meetings, forms, memos, months-long experiences that everyone does together (performance reviews, planning processes), etc.
In my opinion, adding process is necessary and healthy, AND I think being wary of process is smart. I have been amazed to find that it is completely possible to make a 50-person company feel bureaucratic. It turns out that speed and agility have much more to do with how you do things than what size you are. I’ve seen 5,000-person companies that remained relatively agile and 300-person companies that felt like the federal government.
Here are a couple of examples of necessary and healthy places where you need process when you’re growing past 50 employees:
How do we make decisions and who gets to decide what?
How do people find out what we’re doing as a company and why?
How do we decide what to invest our time in?
How do we decide when someone should be paid more or take on a different role?
There are so many more, but hopefully, these examples make it clear that you can’t run a company past a certain size without process. It is a fundamental part of how you organize larger groups of people to efficiently solve problems.
Despite writing this post, I am actually a low-process person. I generally believe that you should only add process when you or a significant number of people on your team are feeling pain. I definitely do not believe in process for the sake of process; I believe in intentional design. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”-type philosophy. And when you find pain, I am a huge believer in implementing the Minimum Viable Process. What is the smallest, most lightweight thing you can try and see if it fixes the problem? I strongly believe that in startups, Minimum Viable Process is good process.
So what is Minimum Viable Process? How do you know when you need a system versus just letting things happen organically?
