👥 How to Maintain Quality When Your Team Grows...

3 critical strategies to uphold quality in a growing startup, inspired by Netflix: Transparent business insights, aligning individual value with company goals, and strategic, passion-focused hiring.

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We’ve all seen it before. You have the world’s coolest product/service when you or your founding team are sweating away and doing it yourself.

But then, as soon as you get real momentum and bring new people on board, things start moving really fast… And quality can, naturally, suffer a bit.

It’s a biggie, not just for startups. And a possible answer came from Netflix. Their years-long HR guru, Patty McCord, has explained a few times how they managed quality throughout rapid growth by focusing on culture.

3 Key People-and-Growth Insights

1. Teach everyone how the business works

A massive bone of contention, because management always seems to want to keep the financials and true goals hidden. Modern workplace psychology, however, tells us teams perform better when they have the full picture.

Netflix actually had weekly meetings where they discussed their acquisition numbers, returns, and profits – the works! They held nothing back because that gave them the ability to unlock Number 2…

2. Show everyone how and where they add value

When everyone knows how the business works, it makes it clearer how each person’s individual contribution adds to the overall picture. Which is a great internal motivator.

“Oh, if I do X, Y and Z, the organic subs go up, lowering our CAC and increasing our LTV, increasing profit. So, if I put in this extra effort, I qualify for this and that bonus…”

You could even structure reviews around it, showing and explaining to team members how their tasks fit into the big picture. It increases autonomy and ownership, motivates and creates a culture of accountability, where everyone is working towards the same goals.

3. Hire selfishly

The third part of this is realising that where a) what I’m good at doing and b) what I love doing meet, is where people will be most efficient. So, large corporates look at this and go “How can I develop my people more?”.

But you’re not a large corporate. As a startup, you actually can’t afford to develop anyone, you need the right people to help take the company where it needs to go.

So, you still focus on finding out what people love doing, but flip it around and look at what your business needs most. Then, only hire the people who really love doing the things you really need.