Our August 13 meeting was on the topic of The Role of Process in Early Stage Companies 

During our meeting, we talked about the challenges of developing a product in an early stage company, from both an engineering and a project management perspective. We would ilke to thank our panel of successful entrepreneurs, who shared their successes and challenges and their advice on how to balance the short-term need for quick results and the long-term need to put effective processes in place.

• Facilitator Jane Divinski, JAD Consulting
• Panelist Subutai Ahmad, VP Engineering, Numenta
• Panelist Jay Michin, former VP Engineering, OnStor
• Panelist Steve Martin, VP Engineering, Ruckus Wireless
• Panelist Jim Nisbet, Founder and CTO at Tablus

• Communication and Common Sense drive the decision on what's the right amount of process needed for a small company: enough to make sure everyone is engaged, understands the corporate goals, challenges and perspectives, but not too much to be a burden to efficiency/extra use of resources and bandwidth at a time when a company can't afford it.
• Companies at all stages have a process in place, even very early stage companies. The first step in creating a process might just be documenting what you're already doing.
• It's important to establish a culture respecting process, even in an early stage company. If you don't have that, it's much more difficult to develop that culture when you're medium size and large.
• Having too much process is wasting resources - it doesn't institutionalize good habits and doesn't kill bad habits. It gets ignored or people go through the motions to follow the process. This negatively impacts the company culture and the way the team looks at management.
• A rule of thumb: You know you need more process when it's too expensive (in time and effort) to communicate.
• Don't hide behind a process. Know when you should make exceptions to a process that's hampering your team's effectiveness.
• Processes are customized for each company - what works for one team/company may not work for another one.

• Communicate a clear direction with transparency, and how each person/team's work is in alignment with that direction.
• Provide achievable stretch goals, or have teams create their own, in alignment with corporate direction.
• Be transparent about financial/funding status of company, and also what needs to be done by when to support company.
• Know when the amount of work produced by someone is outweighed by the overhead he/she causes and proactively manage that. When you proactive manage a dysfunctional team member, not only will you not be burdened by the overhead, your team will better respect your leadership.
• Understand the effects of someone's culture on the overall teams and the overall organization.
• Understanding how people work together on a sports team can help gain insights about how and where someone would fit in your work team and what resources and talents your team needs.
• Attitude is more important than skills as smart people can pick up the skills.
• Be proactive and attack problems when they are small. Not only will you be more likely to address the problem, but your team will better respect your leadership. The problem may not be fixable, but at least you and others will know that you're proactively managing it.
• Be inquisitive and observant, particularly about new technologies and solutions. This will help you not only understand technologies and trends, but will also help you gain the respect of a technical team.
• Engineering processes might be most important in early stage companies, and may become less important later after a product is developed and sales, finance, marketing, etc., play a much more important role. Engineering managers can positively impact cross-department collaboration and company culture by working with the other departments early. If done successfully, the engineering team may have more clout later in the company life cycle, if the company culture is more collaborative.
• Be people-oriented. It's more about the people than the technology. Having a 'wild duck' might help encourage heterogeneous thinking in a large company, but might not work in a small company.
• Support process, but know it's place. Encourage thoughtful risk-taking, even if it questions an existing process.
• Manage your stress level.
• Maintain your focus.

• Develop light-weight, scalable processes that will encourage collaboration and communication.
• Document the processes you're already doing. Going through the process of documenting what you're already doing will be helpful to everyone as well.
• Identify areas that are confusing and developing processes around that will help everyone more effectively use their time, and facilitate communication between individuals, teams, departments, etc.,
• Encourage everyone to regularly update everyone else. For example, encourage everyone to document successes for the week, goals for the coming week, challenges/obstacles to producing results. This will help everyone understand what everyone's doing and coordinate on goals and challenges as well as document progress and measure successes.

• Weekly status reports via e-mail
• wikis, documenting notes informally
• Regular one-page executive summary of where we are, with engineering managers collaborating to create it.
• Face-to-face meetings between people, groups, teams, etc.,
• Project plan with milestones
• Microsoft Project
• Google's event tracking tool called Digital Mantis (good for tracking events, not for creating and managing a plan) http://www.digitalmantis.com/blog/emerging-technology/google-office-to-replace-microsoft-i-dont-think-so/
• Active Collab http://www.activecollab.com/