Welcome to day one of my new series, startup execution. This ongoing series is aimed at helping early-stage companies think about the day-to-day activities needed in order to get things done and move their business forward.
As I mentioned in my introduction post, the authors of Execution: The Discipline of Gettings Things Done (the inspiration for this series), discuss the three core processes of execution:
- The People Process
- The Strategy Process
- The Operations Process
The book is aimed at business executives at larger companies, but much of the framework and the ideas can be readily adapted for startups. On day one of starting your new company, apply these three processes in this order: 1) Strategy, 2) Operations, 3) People. Let's take a quick look at each process.
On day one of starting your new company, apply these three processes in this order.
The Startup Strategy Process
The startup strategy process is the combination of activities that a small group of people perform in order to determine what product they are going to develop, market and sell in order to solve a problem or create new value for a specific customer segment, in order to build a company with the sole purpose of growing fast.
There is a lot in that sentence, and my next post will outline the startup strategy process in depth, but in short, this process is aimed at figuring out what product-market fit is for your company.
The Startup Operations Process
The startup operations process is the combination of activities the startup team will perform to determine how they are going to develop, market and sell in order to solve a problem or create new value for a specific customer segment, in order to build a company with the sole purpose of growing fast.
Strategy is what you plan to create, the operations are how you plan to create it.
The Startup People Process
The startup people process is the combination of activities the startup team will perform to determine who is needed and how to get them to develop, market and sell in order to solve a problem or create new value for a specific customer segment, in order to build a company with the sole purpose of growing fast.
Starting to see a pattern?
Linking each process
My next three posts will outline each process in detail for the first stage of a startup - finding product market fit. But as you can probably tell from the shared language in the descriptions above, each process is deeply connected to the other two processes. In fact, without the three processes appropriately linked, you will fail to execute.
