Define and transform culture
This blog is part of the series "Transform a large-scale architecture guide", see:
- Before the landing
- The first 30 days, and the first half year
- Create the vision
- Get the first product started
- Execution and delivery
- Define and transform culture
Why Define a Culture?
Culture guides the daily behaviors of a team, recognizes and rewards people, identifies great, good, and bad behavior, creates an environment, and defines autonomy. A good cultural environment is necessary for the team to scale and repeat success. Defining culture guidelines also defines the rewarding and recognition system. The right leaders will naturally emerge based on culture, leading the product, technology, and people to success.
A culture that cannot meet the growth of the industry or customer requirements will eventually harm the company. Complaints like being unable to recognize talented people, reward heroes, or prioritize self-interest over customers will eventually be sorted out by competition.
What is Culture?
Culture is a set of habits that people understand and follow well. For example, customer success is a culture, and the team's focus should be on customer success.
Good behavior that creates customer success creates a habit/culture. A single habit cannot guide all behaviors.
Customer success itself defines the guiding principles for work, but other important things may be overlooked. For example, a platform team needs to be simple and consistent. Simple means the platform API should be designed consistency for easy understanding. The concept across the platform should be consistent so that customers don't need to think twice.
Culture defines the hiring, promotion, rewarding system, and guiding principles. Amazon specifically asks and trains people to use them in various documents. My team uses this for hiring, recognition, and promotion.
Define Culture
The first 20 people hired define culture. Culture is not obvious in the first month of running a business. It becomes more and more obvious when interacting with various stakeholders and customers.
The founder of the team defines the culture by hiring the first 20 people. It wasn't clear to me when I started hiring, but all the people hired reflect the founder's values and instincts.
The right culture makes customers and businesses happy. Identify the early stage successes and formalize them. For example:
- Customer success: Customer success generates NPS, promoting and scaling business success.
- Simple and Consistent: Simple interfaces and consistent behavior and APIs simplify the customer onboarding process and make internal and external team communication easier.
- Open Collaboration: In a 2B business environment with many dependencies, finding opportunities to collaborate helps deliver requirements easier and simplifies communication upward or externally.
- Data-Driven and Geek Spirit: Products are built by engineers. Good quality systems are data-driven. Engineers are hackers and are not afraid of technical issues. They always find ways to improve the systems.
Transform Existing Culture
80% of behavior is already decided when a person is hired. The existing people have already adopted a culture, so culture transformation is hard and needs to be done in phases.
- Hire the right people. Hire according to the founder's spirit, identify and decide across the process to ensure the right people are hired. It is a hard process. Interviewing 10 people may generate one candidate, and the market is also competitive. Get help from HR, hire through personal leads, and hire through friends.
- Promote the right people. With the vision and products defined earlier, promote the right people with the right behavior. The old behavior that does not make the business successful should be discussed during 1:1s with serious outcomes. Promote and reward the right people with the right behavior.
- Find positions for people with inappropriate behavior. Talk with peers and leaders to arrange open positions for them. For example, one Ops Engineer we worked with moved to another Ops team and was promoted to a leader because his behavior matched perfectly as an Ops engineer.
- Formalize culture and guide through hiring, promotion, and recognition. Communicate with leaders and team members to build a transparent working environment to help everybody be on the same page.
Transforming an existing culture is challenging since there are many connections in between. Start with a commonly understood vision, create as many allies as possible, and then transform with strength.
