Ask HN: How do I inspire my fellow employees and change company culture?
I work for a small (~20 employees) start-up and our main product is a CRM. Our CRM is functional but very poorly designed. The overall sentiment is as long as it works that's good enough. We aren't in the Valley, Boulder or NYC but a smaller city in the Midwest. Your typical design driven, disrupting, build for the future and change the landscape start-up mentality is definitely not present. We have the potential to have an excellent product, we have customers, we have had investors interested in us and we have had international businesses really interested in our product but my fellow employees have no drive, no desire for excellence and have no problem with throwing .asp code at the screen and seeing what sticks. Our CEO is extremely knowledgeable about the industry but he isn't a designer or a software engineer, yet every feature comes from him. Up until about two months ago, every design decision came from or went through him.
I believe our start-up has a lot of potential to create something amazing but from what I have seen, the employees don't have the drive do it. I want that to change. I believe it actually must change for our company to continue. How do I change this? Can one or two people actively change and influence a company culture? In the words of Aaron Levie, "Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it." I believe we have the found that industry but we aren't building amazing software for it. I want to inspire, influence and excite people but I don't know how.
Thanks for any advice, book recommendations or general comments.
(
12 comments
| 7 points
| on HN
)
1. Product 2. Process ('design-driven') 3. Mindset ('disrupting, build-for-the-future')
You need to start with #1 as it is the easiest. People won't be inspired unless they can see something.
(A) Can you completely redesign the product and prototype it? (B) If so, could you get your coworkers excited? The CEO?
If your answer to (A) is no, or to (B) is "neither", you should give up now.
If you can answer yes to (A) and can target one of the constituencies in (B), craft your strategy accordingly.
Demonstrate value, instead.
You don't need anyone's permission to go do customer development. Take a few days off. Talk to your current customers. Shadow them in their workday. Talk to prospective customers. Shadow them in their workday. Find something on your current roadmap that isn't quite right based on what you learned.
Then, give a short talk about it to the CEO. Hey, this great idea of yours, I talked with some customers about it and I think it's a little off and we'll have to rework it if we roll it out as-is, OR we can do it this way up front and save a bunch of time later.
If they say sure, great. Do it again for a feature that's even more off-kilter. Continue until you're correcting large portions of the roadmap.
If they say no, stand by your idea. Ask to build your version and A/B test it with 50% of your customer base. Instrument both versions heavily so you can see usage. Conduct follow-up interviews. See which one is really better.
Now, it's possible you won't find much to fix, if your CEO really is "extremely knowledgable." You may already be hitting the 80% sweet spot, all the low-hanging fruit. Further disruption may be a long, hard slog for only 20% more value and your CEO may already recognize that.
But you won't know that for sure until you do the research yourself.
I'll add that the beliefs expressed sound more like the voice of theory than of experience. If the company is profitable, why should the owner invite outside investors to share the pie? Collecting money across international borders is historically fraught with difficulty for small companies, and even large corporations segment international markets. Finally, technical debt is no worse than borrowing from investors - it creates leverage at the price of repayment.
My advice is to look, listen and learn. Your boss and coworkers are as smart and rational as anyone else. Figure out why their behaviors make sense from a business standpoint.
I'm not quite sure what you are talking about regarding investing. As far as I know, we haven't taken any outside invested but we have had interest. I am more than happy to leave that up to the directors and CEO :).
Secondly, understand that you are in a long bet scenario. Your goals may not be achieved until several years after you leave. You may need to anchor conversations towards extremes to make your recommendations seem more reasonable. This will feel unrewarding. Having a partner or two in mindset drastically helps your outlook and staves off fatigue.
Culture comes from the top down.
It is possible that your CEO realizes this and would welcome a conversation about the topic.