Thriving as a Lean Startup: Mastering Multiple Roles with a Small Team

A lean startup is all about doing more with less. It’s avoiding wasteful practices by choosing more efficient and productive ways to move forward. Before investing a lot of resources in an idea, startups should validate the product as they go and pivot accordingly if things don’t go as planned. It’s chasing a vision and taking risks while minimizing waste and inefficiencies. To do that, a startup should embrace the idea of optimizing resources and maximizing productivity. If your small team can wear many hats and pull off multiple roles, that is an efficient way to bootstrap successfully and achieve better productivity. It doesn’t necessarily mean over-extending your team. It only means delegating properly and efficiently and choosing the right people to begin with.

Embracing Versatility

Simply put, versatility means the ability to do many things well. It’s important to know the talent and skills of each employee and assign them in roles and positions where they can shine. Before you begin your hiring process, strategically take inventory of all the skills your startup needs to thrive. If you can find candidates who show greater versatility in terms of knowledge and skill, that would provide you with better flexibility as you navigate the challenges and uncertainties of a startup environment.

It’s important to set the right expectations right from the start about the possibility of the job description evolving according to the company’s needs and the employee’s skills and abilities. This way, incoming workforce can know what to expect in terms of scope and the level of versatility required.

Your team’s skill set can make or break your startup’s success. Thus, you should also find ways to help employees broaden their horizon and expand their skills. You can do this by leveraging cross-functional training and workshops. Many employees actually appreciate being given the opportunity to learn more, and your startup will also rake in all the benefits of a seasoned and well-trained team of brilliant and versatile employees.

Prioritization for Efficiency

As mentioned, it’s important to assign each employee tasks that can maximize their core skill and full potential. Instead of letting a skilled employee do menial tasks, find ways to automate repetitive activities and prioritize assigning them high-impact activities that can generate high-value results. Harness the way you prioritize and set clear daily or weekly objectives.

Streamlined Scheduling for Small Teams

To thrive and produce their best work, employees should be given the support and tools they need to manage time, craft daily schedules, and accommodate multiple job functions. There are a lot of scheduling and project management tools that a small team can use to manage tasks and deadlines more effectively. Explore your options and invest in saas applications that can seamlessly facilitate your day-to-day operations.

Collaborative Delegation

Delegation is an art form. Mastering it can supercharge your team’s success and help your startup unlock more possibilities. How you delegate can impact not only the results produced but also the sense of trust, accountability, collaboration, and job satisfaction across your team. To delegate effectively, you need to establish clear communication, assess skills and aptitudes, empower decision-making, do regular feedback and follow-up, and most importantly, trust and let go. You need help to mobilize the plethora of tasks and responsibilities of your business, but you also need to synchronize all the help you’re getting by becoming a master delegator, an effective leader.

Inspiring Success Stories of Small Teams

Let’s cite the inspiring story of Airbnb which has revolutionized the hospitality industry in the world. Back in the day, Airbnb’s founders Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk, and Joe Gebbia along with their small team had to wear many hats, from taking photographs of the hosts’ properties to handling customer support. They had to adapt to various roles to fuel the startup’s growth while capturing more business and testing their product’s viability.

The project management tool Trello also started from humble beginnings. Their original team was very small, and team members had to work on various aspects of product development. Their co-founder Joel Spolsky had to be a jack-of-all-trades, supporting development while taking care of customer support and marketing.

Other big companies like MailChimp, Basecamp, and Whatsapp had to juggle many tasks and become more resourceful when they started. Everyone, who is starting from scratch, starts small. In fact, it’s by starting small that a company can learn the value of efficiency and strategy. Minimizing unnecessary financial burdens allows you to focus on what’s important– perfecting your product and understanding your niche before you scale up and dominate.

Conclusion

Embracing the lean startup methodology can help your team become more adaptable and agile. Besides cost efficiency, a lean startup focuses on what truly matters. It allows you and your team to avoid large financial commitments and irrelevant distractions that may be straying you away from the real big picture.

Want more tips to grow and optimize your startup? Check out Talisman.

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