The book contains 37 rules and experience in their application. I will note the rules that I personally paid attention to, and would apply, and partially have already applied.
Such as:
- the importance of metrics and tests at all stages of the life of a company or product
- wait for the first crisis in a year, it will straighten your brains and that’s great
- any direction is launched from the "pilots"
- fire the HR department
- only payback is a positive result of the "pilot"
The rest are either simple or water.
Doing and analyzing is more important than analyzing and not doing
Yes, it would also seem an old topic, but I like this approach. Not a perfect product, great starting point. Think and do, then we'll figure it out. After launch, we begin to test it in different niches, it is a mistake to rely only on your vision and plan, this is subjective. Almost like “wow wow and in production” only with a test of niches or target audience.
The sooner a conceptual crisis occurs, the better. "Izbenka" survived it a year and a half after launch. And this period changed the whole company a lot.
Wait for the first crisis, this is normal, this revision may even be the essence of a product or idea. The experience of other companies says about the same, a year laterиthe situation will change, although it will be corrected more precisely. First experiences and feedback are of the utmost importance and it is foolish not to change after receiving them. Hence the critical importance of collecting and analyzing data and all indicators. But this is often forgotten, they either look at general indicators or don’t look at all, in the spirit of “we are a startup, it’s too early for us to analyze.”
There are big words in the book “No fines” and “No budget”.
We change fines for layoffs. A fine is a punishment for bad work or behavior, you don’t want to work well or you behave badly, the sense of such a person in general. It's easier to get fired.
The absence of budget protection procedures is changing the transparency of the company's expenses and cash flows. You have nothing to defend if at any moment and so everything, and everyone can see. There is no return on the budget, see the point about fines. Or below about payback.
Attitude towards errors
Mistakes in the company are a normal phenomenon, not "jambs", but mistakes. A “jamb” is negligence, and a mistake is a desire to try something. A mistake is experience, an expert is someone who has made more mistakes. Of course, all errors must be measured and analyzed. Back to the importance of metrics. If you rename errors into experiments, then they should be carried out constantly.
In the same book, the expression “bullets first, then cores” is found, that is, in any direction, first an experimental launch (pilot), then the main one. We conducted a test, it worked, we deploy it further, it didn’t work, we don’t touch it or we change the conditions of the experiment.
The HR department has minimal impact on the development of the company
Each department is engaged in the selection of personnel itself. Of course, he has the right to attract an agency, but he takes it "under himself" and bears responsibility for it himself. The HR department should not have a significant voice in the formation of teams. In general, there is a tendency that Western companies refuse HR departments as redundant ones. The idea is that a personnel officer can also get a person to work, and a psychologist, and a freelance one, is better at working with staff. So everyone is equal before him.
The obvious rule is that team motivation is more important than professionalism.
Payback
This rule was not in the book, but there is an approach. Applicable to stores looks like this, the new point should go to 0 in two weeks, we don’t close it. We don’t wait, we don’t think, we don’t blame seasonality, but we close it. It's the same with any idea, set a clear time for payback, don't delay.
Business plan from Pareto:
- take money (time)
- opening 10 points (directions of services)
- after 2 months we leave 2 in the black
- close 8
Repeat as much money as you have (time).
Read! Read more good books to do less bad things.
Cultivate and infect colleagues with the culture of reading books and discussing them. The office library is amazing.
Any product can be returned without a receipt and in return receive its full value.
The idea that the client should come back with a complaint to you, and not to the Internet. How much are companies willing to pay to answer or remove negative reviews? Obviously more than the money returned to the client by check. I think this measure is cheaper and more practical than the employees of the SMM department.
Doubling people, suppliers, services is a modern entrepreneurial approach.
I don’t fully understand this idea in practice yet, but it may feel good. The doubling of suppliers, of course, employees ... I don’t know, in terms of the spirit of competition, maybe, from the financial side, there was no such practice, maybe it’s normal.
It’s a good practice to change the developer’s work site, so everyone knows all the places, conditionally of course. And the responsibility that your code will be looked at and corrected.
Automation
Well, in the end, a few chapters about technology and process automation. Starting with cameras for the availability of goods and ending with accounting systems, automatic reports, auto-order to the store and bots in Telegram. Moreover, both for employees and customers.
This is the most obvious part, without technology, nowhere.
As a result, I emphasized for myself
Analysis and metrics.
Automation and reporting.
people and responsibility.
Summary
Easy book, you can learn interesting practices from there. In addition, at the end of the list of interesting books. 🙂
Thanks for reading.
Source: habr.com