(2018-10-17) Sethi How To Transform And Build A People Platform

Arjun Sethi: How to Transform and Build a People Platform. It’s not such a big deal that Koum, Acton, Systrom, and Krieger left Facebook. What’s astonishing is that they stayed so long in the first place

Facebook can survive a few people leaving because it built a strong platform around its people.

Companies that want to survive the next 10 years build software platforms. Companies that want to survive beyond that build people platforms.

People Platforms

When a company is racing toward product-market fit and trying to scale their product to thousands or even millions of users, it reaches a turning point. If it wants to compounding growth, it needs to transition from a single product team to a people platform that can support multiple teams.

A software platform works as an intermediary between a company’s products, users, and third-party developers, enabling new and surprising behavior. It creates an ecosystem that allows new products and services to be built at lower incremental costs

A people platform extends and amplifies the capabilities of team members the way a software platform extends and amplifies the capabilities of its products.

Design Principles for Building a Platform for Your Team

If you try to organize your company on the same model as a Google or an Amazon, you won’t actually build something that lasts. The pediatrician John Gall’s research into the development of children led him to a simple truth about systems. (Systemantics)

Amazon’s decentralized, “two pizza” teams work because product teams have a core set of internal tools and APIs that the teams can plug into. Spotify’s “chapters” and “squads” org structure is built around developing a mobile music player and a web app. Trying to copy them blindly ignores the context of your own company.

loosening the reins and delegating key decision-making to team members on the ground rather than to founders.

Here are four design principles

• Flatten the ladder
• Create clean interfaces and autonomy between teams. Instead of structuring the way a team operates, structure how the teams communicate and interface with one another, and allow them to execute autonomously.
• Burn the ships
• Leave culture undetermined

1. Flatten the ladder

Startups should spend less time looking for leadership to “fix” the company through external hires, and more time trying to create conditions that allow leadership to grow from within

Marissa Mayer, an early product manager at Google, bet a coworker that she could train new product managers faster than he could hire them. This training program was known as the “Associate Product Manager” (APM)

In a 7,000-word expose on the company, Kurt Eichenwald writes: “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed — every one — cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft.”

2. Create clean interfaces and autonomy between teams

Teams should be loosely coupled. That means there are few dependencies between teams, and teams are able to move quickly and independently.

Teams also need bounded contexts — the ability to communicate in a ubiquitous language without needing deep, domain-specific expertise.

Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.

Amazon’s management philosophy can basically be summed up in two parts:

• More coordination wastes more time.
• The people closest to the problem are in the best position to solve it.

Early on at Amazon, each team was measured according to a single, key business metric called a “fitness function.” (KPI)

As a consultant advising Zappos on the holacracy rollout noted: “Asking [employees] to learn the management equivalent of Dungeons and Dragons on top of their workload is foolish, if not inhumane.”

3. Burn the ships

To build a platform for your team, you have to design for change, and often times that means setting your ships, or security blanket, on fire.

Netflix had to do the hard thing and burn their ships by sidelining the DVD business. This began on a single day, when Reed Hastings banned every team member working on the DVD-delivery end of the business from executive staff meetings. At the time, 100% of Netflix’s revenue came from delivering DVDs.

4. Leave company culture underdetermined.

If you try to set culture from the top, you’ll add process but stifle innovation

Cultural values should be memorable and underdetermined, meaning they’re fluid and adaptable

At a glance, Alibaba’s cultural values are unremarkable: customer first, teamwork, embrace change, integrity, passion, and commitment. What’s more important is how those compressed and invoked throughout the organization. At Alibaba, each of those six values is known internally as the “Six Vein Spirit Sword” — a reference to Jack Ma’s favorite series of kung-fu novels. see 2017-12-19-AllAboutAlibabaAmbitionAndHumilityInTheCompanysCampusAndCulture

From the start of the company, each team member took a name from the novelist Jin Yong’s book The Proud, Smiling Wanderer, a popular martial arts romance in China. To this day, each Alibaba employee is given a nickname that is used across the company, from emails to meetings and performance evaluations.

Jin Yong’s characters are “like a brotherhood, like a band of brothers, it’s a group of people that are fighting for values of righteousness, loyalty.”

Uber’s culture promoted aggressive problem-solving and autonomous decision-making by team members. This allowed the company to adapt from the bottom up from city to city.

The downside was that these values determined not just results but how those results were achieved as well, promoting a cutthroat culture that prioritized growth above all else.

Last year, a series of scandals shook Uber to its core

Startups today prioritize short-term gains over investing in their people. In part, that’s because companies are conditioned to think in two-year increments of time. You’re completely focused on the milestones you need to hit to raise your next round

If you want to build a company that can last 100 years, start by putting in place a set of core building blocks that enable new behavior and innovation.