Success in early-stage startups is largely predicated on making fast decisions. Ideally, the decisions are right and timed with demand in the market.

Here’s the difficulty: once a company has a foothold, the ‘moves’ they make are more complex (larger codebases, different pricing models, support mechanisms, etc). Building at scale means continuing to make fast decisions while incorporating additional inputs.

Being in a rapidly-growing ecosystem can be frustrating, especially for tenured employees. Things seem to ‘slow down.’ People feel that it takes more steps (often with new stakeholders that are much more process oriented) to get something done.

I like to think of organizations as ecosystems. With more inputs, they become more complex. Keeping things healthy means balancing both the inputs and the outputs.

This is a way for organizations to effectively navigate growth while keeping the joy of a startup front and center. Keep the culture of a startup going while you mature and keep an eye on the future. Build what’s necessary with an eye on the future.

An introduction to Minimum Viable Process

<aside> ⚖️ Dan’s Mindset of Minimum Viable Process:

The implementation of approaches that produce the most desirable outcome(s) that prioritize efficiency while minimizing effort in order to facilitate speed.

</aside>

For a first read, that’s a bit wordy. Put simply, it’s the responsibility of process owners to minimize friction with their systems.

• To make it more digestable, lets break down each of the bolded & color coded words:
• Efficiency = the ability to accomplish a sequence of things in an elegant way.
• Speed = the time accomplish a thing following the most direct route.
• Effort = the amount of energy you need to exert to complete a thing.
• Outcomes = the manifested end state after completing a thing (ie. what we want to end up with)

The goal of an organization is to minimize entropy while either building or maintaining the ecosystem.

To borrow a concept from construction, you don’t want to ‘over engineer’ something. This is a slightly counterintuitive concept.

For example, a flood wall outside a city may be designed for a ‘One Hundred Year Flood’, but it isn’t designed for a ‘One Thousand Year Flood’. Why? Because at a certain point an event isn’t likely to occur. (Or, if it did, that event would imply catastrophic issues beyond the system itself).

As a company grows, there is a tradeoff between growing quickly and maintaining stability. Minimum Viable Process enables you to remain nimble while introducing process that meets the need for stability within the organization.

This can be a really tricky concept to grasp. In a nutshell, create a path for someone to do something without making it more difficult than it needs to be.

Efficiency is not speed. Rather, efficiency is the ability to accomplish a sequence of things in an elegant way that accommodates the needs of stakeholders.

Change fatigue

Thinking through how change impacts your organization is vitally important. I’ve expanded my thoughts on that in the page below.