The Multiteaming Way: Organized Anarchy at a Startup Company
Author: Jurgen Appelo
The art of work is to maximize results with minimal pain.
Startup life can be undistinguishable from anarchy. With only a few people, you need to talk with customers, explore value propositions, build your infrastructure, handle legal issues, organize finances, and agree on purpose and strategy while also writing blog posts, interacting with your community, and maintaining a presence on social media.
A startup must do everything.
With our startup team, we cannot say, "Let's focus only on business model testing for a month and ignore all the rest". If we did that, who would talk with the notary, the shareholders, the community, or the service desk of the database platform that's generating mysterious errors? If we focused on only one thing, the rest of our little company would fall apart! Startup life feels anarchistic because the team must act like a fully formed business with just a handful of people.
But there's a way to bring order to the chaos.
Seven weeks ago, The unFIX Company started working as a team of seven people. We were faced with the challenge of how to do the work that had previously been done by just one person (and how to start the work that wasn't done at all). As in any other startup, it was all somewhat overwhelming. The solution we came up with was to define sub-teams around specific areas of value creation.
Areas of Value Creation (Turfs)
Our team identified three areas where we wanted to experiment with value propositions that could lead to revenue streams. This resulted in three Turfs with their own small crews:
Partnerships: Exclusive benefits for coaches, consultants, and others who want to offer the unFIX model to their clients.
Ignition: A program for companies playing with the unFIX model that prefer to have our team involved to kick things off.
Qualification: An alternative to traditional certificates for people who like to learn and contribute in a more gamified way.
In addition, we defined two separate value streams that would be important for branding, marketing, and generating leads and prospects:
Content: All the free one-directional deliverables we create around the unFIX model, such as blog posts, newsletters, and game card downloads.
Community: Our bi-directional exchanges around the unFIX model, including community chats and online meetups.
But that was still not all.
As I frequently discuss in my talks and presentations, the danger of having separate value streams is that teams tend to sub-optimize for their own areas. The Partnerships Crew only does partnerships; the Ignition Crew focuses on the Ignition programs, and so on. The result is that customers could be hopping between "agile islands": all is well within one value stream, but things don't integrate well between them. And the entire customer journey, with touchpoints across the whole company, can still lead to disappointments.
That's why we added a Customers crew:
Customers: Understand customer needs and guide users across our various offerings.
These six outward-facing crews (all having direct contact with customers) are complemented by four inward-looking platform crews:
People & Coaching: Do what is needed to keep our team members happy.
Legal & Finance: Make sure to keep the company from legal or financial troubles.
Model: Nurture and develop the unFIX pattern library in service of the whole company.
Infra & Intel: Give team members the tools and the data to collaborate effortlessly.
Last but not least, the company needs official representation toward its shareholders. And, as we learned from Management 3.0, self-organization without constraints equals anarchy. Therefore, a Governance Crew is there to create the boundaries within which everyone can achieve their best:
Governance: Officially represent the company. And manage the system, not the people.
Snapshot of The unFIX Company on 21 December 2022. Things will change!
Note: the person in a black circle is the Captain of the crew.
Multitasking versus Multiteaming
At first glance, it may seem that the unFIXed structure we visualized is a bit too heavy for the seven people we have on our team. They now find themselves distributed across eleven "mini-crews" that are all subsets of the same team. I know from experience there is always someone who will object to this picture and say that "multitasking" is undesirable and that people should be working on just one thing. But the criticism doesn't hold for several reasons:
We are not multitasking; we are multiteaming. I can focus an entire morning (as I am doing now) on a blog post and a newsletter as a member of the Content Crew. This afternoon, I plan to spend most of my time on the Customers Crew. And if I have some time left, I may pick up a task from the Legal & Finance Crew. Multitasking is rapidly and frequently switching between contexts. Multiteaming is refocusing between different areas just a few times per day.
Everyone is always context-switching. I could redraw the entire picture as one product with one shared backlog, tag all backlog items with product area names such as "Partnerships", "Ignition", and "Qualification", and then say that the whole team has its focus on only one value stream. They are merely context-switching between product backlog items, just like everyone else! Nothing will have changed except that some fundamentalists will have stopped criticizing the picture.
Startup teams should be exploring. As long as there is no clear-cut value stream with a proven business model, the whole company is in a state of flux. Many things need to be done by a few people just to explore the business landscape and see what works. It's similar to my friends getting their kids to switch between karate, violin, football, piano, singing, and theater lessons, which allows them to discover what they like best. This is not a problem; it is a feature of a young business.
We are preparing ourselves for the future. Assuming our team can find a way toward Product/Market Fit, we should start preparing for what comes after. Why not organize ourselves as if the company was already ten times larger? The different crews have different ways of working. Making content is not the same as handling finance, and our work on infrastructure is very different from our customer interviews. The picture is what we might look like if we had fifty people. It's like familiarizing yourself with a bigger car or house when you know the family is soon getting larger.
Is our way of working efficient? Heavens, no.
Is it effective? Hell, yes!
The Multiteaming Way
The benefit of multiteaming is that team members can optimize their work in a way that makes sense to each area of value. Each crew handles its own backlog, its own meeting cadence, and its own approach to goal-setting. For example, our work on Infra and Intel is not comparable to our work on the Ignition offerings, so let's not force-fit it all into one method or framework.
On the other extreme, purely isolated areas, with one person dedicated exclusively to each Turf, also doesn't work. Apart from the considerable risk of the bus-factor problem, it would mean that some team members would be overworked while others would have little to do. Our approach allows people to shift their availability to the areas where we have the most work waiting.
Our team members are all involved in multiple crews. In addition, we have two or three all-hands meetings per week, and we can talk all day in our crew-specific and general-purpose chat channels. The effect of this is that, at this time, we do not need Forums. Knowledge and experience already spread easily across the company.
Hopefully, as we prepare each area for a time when more people join our team, each of us can narrow their attention to the work we find most fulfilling. It would be similar to the kids of my friends discovering that it's karate and singing they enjoy the most and giving up on their other experiments and activities.
No way of working is perfect. It's all a matter of balancing the benefits and drawbacks. Multiteaming is a form of organized anarchy. For sure, context-switching can be painful. But it's a bearable pain for now, and it's a reasonable compromise between the more considerable pains of the extremes on either side. A whole-team method for everything doesn't work. And one person per area also doesn't work. The art of work is to maximize results with minimal pain. Multiteaming is a practical solution for now.
I hope and expect that the picture will be different in a year or so. 😁
