How do you Organise day-2-day Work in a Seed Stage Startup?
My personal experience of leading three different functions
So, as it happens, I have several different functions under my direction in meaning and spirit, but all of them are built around the customer. They are:
👉 customer service;
👉 marketing and sales (including a piece of branding advertising on the platform);
👉 Content, in our case this is what the product card looks like with descriptions, nutritional value, photos, etc.
Our work had to be built on the fly. I divided it into three phases, and I structured each one differently. In a startup, you need flexibility like nowhere else. At the same time, taking advantage of the integration function as a manager is crucial.
It’s a very long post, so I will divide it into three parts to avoid unintentionally cutting out essential nuances.
I see guys from competing services in Tashkent are subscribed to me, so I’m happy to share best practices. I miss serious competitors to justify a performance marketing budget :) I sincerely wish everyone to increase their turnover so that I’m not the only one who floods the market with ads to form the habit of customers.
Setting
At first, there were only the first two functions, and I did dailies for an hour so that my colleagues and I would gradually begin to understand each other, set tasks, and keep track of them. There were two tools at the time: Trello for tasks and a channel in Slack for communication.
The tasks in Trello had three attributes:
✔️ Task owner and persons involved
✔️ Task deadline
✔️ Eisenhower Matrix Importance
I thought long and hard about clearly and simply dividing tasks for all team members. In the end, I used an option from the classics of management:
🔴 Important and urgent — do it today and now, the highest priority.
🟠 Important and not urgent — do as a second priority. These tasks can get redder later.
🟡 Unimportant and urgent — don’t do it, and don’t even put it in Trello.
🟢 Unimportant and non-urgent — don’t do it, and don’t even put it in the Trello.
The work started up, and we changed the format after a month.
Development
We became “better” at understanding each other, so we compressed the dailies to half an hour. At that time, we focused exclusively on marketing and customer research, and customer service was perceived as something other than an independent unit. The Content was appearing in our field.
How was the discussion structured?
✅ The task can be discussed and solved in a couple of minutes on the next steps.
❌ Requires more time, go to a separate meeting.
✅ You can make a decision within the growth team.
❌ Need to involve other functions, write them in slack or have a short meeting.
✅ Divided into parts and checklists.
❌ Needs detail for team discussion; wrap it up yourself or get someone on the team to help
We also worked on the board in Trello, and made it into a funnel
🔜 Backlog.
🔛 Tasks started but not in focus for today
🔝 Doing today.
🔙 Postponed until deadline clarification or questionable importance.
✔️ Done.
Every day in the daily meeting, we discuss the tasks we will do today.
But this pattern has quickly become obsolete as well…
Getting mature
As it happens in life, we got a lot more different tasks. Now our team’s jobs are wider than lead generation, support & customer service and content.
We also had a lot more added to us:
👉 commerce in the assortment development
👉 brand advertising on the platform, its extra margin in e-com
👉 corporate customers, and that’s a different big market in general!
And every business day starts with four daily meetings:
🕐 Synchronisation with operations on orders, weather, delivery people, etc.
🕑 Support & customer service — defect rate, response rate, transformation plan (I’ll tell you more about this one)
🕒 Lead generation — traffic, conversions, retention, etc.
🕓 Content — plan/ fact photos, plan/ fact SKU attributes, complaint handling.
So we already have many metrics and are on track with them
In future episodes:
⏯️️ How to discover a CVP and identify its enablers
⏩️ How to create a feature and define metrics for it, and turn it into a product
⏭️ How to identify new revenue streams