Startup, Scaleup, Screwup

42 Tools to Accelerate Lean and Agile Business Growth

Jurgen Appelo

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781119526858
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119526797
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Real-world tools to build your venture, grow your business, and avoid mistakes

Startup, Scaleup, Screwup is an expert guide for emerging and established businesses to accelerate growth, facilitate scalability, and keep pace with the rapidly changing economic landscape. The contemporary marketplace is more dynamic than ever before—increased global competition, the impact of digital transformation, and disruptive innovation factors require businesses to implement agile management and business strategies to compete and thrive. This indispensable book provides business leaders and entrepreneurs the tools and guidance to meet growth and scalability challenges head on. 

Equal parts motivation and practical application, this book answers the questions every business leader asks from the startup ventures to established companies. Covering topics including funding options, employee hiring, product-market validation, remote team management, agile scaling, and the business lifecycle, this essential resource provides a solid approach to grow at the right pace and stay lean. This book will enable you to:

• Apply 42 effective tools to sustain and accelerate your business growth
• Avoid the mistakes and pitfalls associated with rapid business growth or organizational change
• Develop a clear growth plan to integrate into your overall business model
• Structure your business for rapid scaling and efficient management

Startup, Scaleup, Screwup: 42 Tools to Accelerate Lean & Agile Business Growth is a must-read for entrepreneurs, founders, managers, and senior executives. Author Jurgen Appelo shares his wisdom on the creative economy, agile management, innovation marketing, and organizational change to provide a comprehensive guide to business growth. Practical methods and expert advice make this book an essential addition to any business professional's library. 

1
Persistence of Vision

Inspire team members, customers, and investors with a Product Vision: a mental image of your desired future.

Many of us are visionaries. As entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, founders, leaders, and creatives, we envision things that do not yet exist. We want those things to become real.

For example:

Wouldn’t it be great if there were no bad jobs, no bad managers, and no bad companies? Wouldn’t it be awesome if everything we knew about doing better work was somehow stored in data and algorithms in such a way that machines helped us to improve our organizations? Wouldn’t it be great if, someday in the not-so-far future, rather than us telling computers how to do mindless work, they helped us do meaningful work?

Someday, machines will understand how teams of people do their best work together. They will offer us suggestions, such as, “You might want to clean up your product backlog after yesterday’s customer demo”; and “This was your 500th daily cafe. How about celebrating it? I have an idea for you to surprise your team”; and “Hey, your last agile retrospective was six weeks ago. Here is a new retro exercise that’s popular right now in your industry.”

Who needs managers watching over people’s shoulders when artificial intelligence will be able to help teams to hire people, guide performance, and achieve organizational change? A smart business is the kind of company I want my startup to be! Everyone loving their jobs. Everyone trying to make things better. And intelligent machines helping us to improve our work. As far as I know, machine learning algorithms have no interest in the top floor corner office, a limousine with driver, or the parking space next to the office entrance. We would save tons of money on management perks, bonuses, and printed PowerPoint slide decks!

What I just described is only a vision. But it’s a nice one. I believe that innovation often starts with visionaries.

As an entrepreneur, intrapreneur, founder, leader, or creative, you need a Product Vision. It describes the essence of an innovative product: what it aims to achieve for its users and customers. A great Product Vision helps people to mentally visualize what value should be delivered, as if they’re hearing a short story about a successful business in the future.

Michał Borkowski, founder and CEO of Brainly, had a few minutes to spare for me at Brainly’s office in Kraków, Poland. The company was growing so fast, they literally occupied a temporary office in between their old and new offices.

We defined the opportunity ahead of us in a way that scales globally. There are 1.2 billion students in the world and every student needs help learning every day. If we think about the problem that Brainly is solving, it’s that big problem. Quite often, what I see is that the problems that startups are trying to solve are not big enough. They are chasing an opportunity that is way smaller than the real opportunity that is ahead of them. It was the same for us early on. We started in Poland. We were initially not thinking about our global opportunity. We were just thinking about our own country. It took us about three years to really figure out why we are here and what we are trying to achieve. Now that it’s clearly defined, it helps me to manage the company towards that vision. I would encourage every startup founder and CEO to think about their big vision way earlier than we have done.

Michał Borkowski, founder and CEO of Brainly, Kraków, Poland

The reason that we craft a vision is to have a direction in which to navigate with our team’s product development efforts. We can dream our dreams and then formulate a vision without knowing anything about available technologies, markets, or revenue streams. We figure out the details later. The first thing we need to do is to inspire ourselves and our cofounders, if we have them, our first team members, if we want them, and any investors, if we need them. Without the inspiration of the people around us, nobody will care about figuring out the details of how to get there. Without a vision, there probably won’t be a realization of the dream.

Don’t confuse a Product Vision with a strategic plan. Sharing a dream with your team is not about a list of features on a Product Roadmap. A vision is not a carefully crafted statement concocted by a committee on a two-day retreat in a wellness resort. A vision is not the slogan on a mug filled with a cappuccino that was excreted from a push-button machine. Instead, your vision is a verbal image of the future, in language that you would use when you told your story in a bar, to convince your friends to help you make things happen. And the vision is big, bold, and compelling. I have a dream comes before I have a team. It is what separates the great leaders from the failed ones.

Marc Wesselink, managing partner at Startupbootcamp, spoke enthusiastically across the large table of the shared meeting room in Amsterdam. The building was full of startups and, what seemed to me, a well-organized creative chaos.

When I look at all the dozens or hundreds of startups that went by, the great ones have something that the others don’t. There is one thing that makes all the difference. The best founders have a True North. They have some sort of clock ticking in them that they want to solve a huge problem. But then, in what way and how and to which customers, that’s not certain yet. They are willing to be flexible, as long as they can make progress toward their vision. That’s, by far, the biggest differentiator.

Marc Wesselink, managing partner at Startupbootcamp, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

I think Marc is correct. And not only for startups, the small companies that are trying to prove that their new product idea is viable. It is also true for scaleups, the successful companies with validated business models that are scaling out to more markets and more products. It is true for established companies, whose leaders and intrapreneurs are trying to transform and reinvent their organizations so that they are not outmaneuvered and replaced by the startups and the scaleups.

An often-heard complaint about management in mature organizations is the lack of a clear direction. Employees are all busy selling products and services, but nobody knows where the company is heading. None of the workers feel inspired by a dream for a better future. To address this concern, the business leaders of traditional companies need to communicate a shared vision. And they need to do so consistently and persistently. It makes a huge difference to the creativity, collaboration, and commitment of teams when they are shown a big, bold dream. This enables them to envision the future results of their work. Nobody dreams about ordinary product features, unless they are nightmares. But imagining how the world is going to change in the future, and how the work that they’re doing is contributing to that future, that is worth dreaming about. People need to say, “If that’s going to be possible soon, count me in. I want to make it happen!”

I tried not to make a mess of my wet tea bag on a large, black table somewhere in Helsinki, Finland, while Jenni Tolonen explained to me the original vision of the company Management Events, of which she is now the CEO.

Our founder wanted us to help Finnish people be more social at business-to-business events and bring them together. In today’s very digital world, if the face-to-face contacts are well-facilitated and they are matched around common interests, and the environment is fun and engaging, people can generate good business. They can make new contacts. They can get new ideas. Maybe they even get their problems solved. That’s what our founder wanted, so that’s where our vision lies. And we’re happy that we have made good progress toward that vision.

Jenni Tolonen, CEO at Management Events, Helsinki, Finland

At the risk of sounding like a pedantic hairsplitter—which I probably am—I think what Jenni referred to was originally a company vision and then became a c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Prologue
• 1 Persistence of Vision
• 2 Stories of Your Life and Others
• 3 Picking Up the Pieces
• 4 The Persona Protocol
• 5 Fortune’s Wheel
• 6 The Crowded Shadows
• 7 The Lunatic Cafe
• 8 Streams of Silver
• 9 The Invention of Everything Else
• 10 The Terminal Experiment
• 11 Fables and Reflections
• 12 Kings of the North
• 13 The Entropy Tango
• 14 A Pleasure to Burn
• 15 The New Recruit
• 16 The Enigma Score
• 17 Standard Hero Behavior
• 18 The Darkest Road
• 19 Ghost Writer in the Sky
• 20 Million-Dollar Gamble
• 21 Spheres of Influence
• 22 Heart Journey
• 23 A Pirate’s Tale
• 24 Test of the Twins
• 25 Culture Clash
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement