Overcoming Lack of Shared Company Objectives in an Early-stage Startup

Abstract

The thesis addresses the organizational challenges of lacking the big pictures in an early-stage startup. First, the author joined a newborn software venture as a founding product manager and observed the dynamics in his daily practice. Then, through numerous interviews with team leaders and employees, the author analyzed the data and discovered several issues happening in this newborn company. Among the findings, the most significant one is that the leaders didn’t reach a consensus on the company’s long-term goal; and the employees didn’t have an aligned sense of the company’s mission and product vision. This phenomenon led to employees’ low productivity in new product development, constantly making incorrect trade-offs, and misaligning collaboration across different teams.

The project presented a design toolkit consisting of a canvas and an instruction brochure to overcome the challenge. This design toolkit helped the leaders collaboratively develop a big shared picture by outlining the company’s mission and product vision. The author held a design workshop to implement the solution with three company co-founders and successfully generate the organization’s long-term goal. As a result, the author evaluated the outcome by comparing employees’ behavioral changes.

Internally, an enormous leap in the team’s productivity has been identified. Employees were able to accelerate the progress of the product development by eliminating irrelevant tasks. Additionally, the collective big pictures improved the collaborations between the product team and the business development team. Finally, they could make the right trade-offs according to the company’s big pictures. Externally, the CEO utilized the well-developed company mission and product vision to stand out from other candidates while applying startup accelerators. As a result, the company impressed the recruiter and successfully entered into a startup accelerator. Moreover, two corporations also invited the company to collaborate on building the product.

In terms of customer acquisition, enhanced employee productivity helped the company get its first paid customer eight months after it was founded. These company achievements complement the outcome of the thesis by proving the importance of the company’s mission and product vision in an early-stage startup.