Scaling “high-growth” start-ups in fashion

50% annual growth: How did we do that? This is the original draft that was published at http://www.netcentric.biz/blog/2016/08/50--annual-growth--how-did-we-do-that-.html

I joined Netcentric when there were 12 people in the Barcelona office. Back then, the expansion plans called my attention. The market was vibrant and Elian and Dominik convinced me that Adobe had a great vision for AEM (back then called CQ). They wanted to grow to around 50 people in one year. Today (after three years) we are a team of 250 people in four cities and continue with the same goal of growing and keeping the startup spirit. Adobe has expanded AEM to become the keystone of the Adobe Marketing Cloud and the demand for the product keeps growing. In this atmosphere, growing is just a side effect of the market.

However, growing at a 50% pace during the last three years was not easy. You may wonder, How do you structure the company to be able to respond to change? How do you attract and keep talent? What kind of skills are necessary? And how do you develop them? If you are interested in finding out, keep on reading.

There are different types of entrepreneurship visions. There is one kind of entrepreneurs who focus on a local market, small team, and limited growth. They want to continue doing what they love. Probably their main driver to start a business is their need for independence. These guys hate having a boss and their contribution to the overall job market ranges between 15 to 40 people.

On the other hand, there is a very small set of entrepreneurs who aim high and big. These guys create companies that represent a disproportionately large contribution to net job creation. They are fans of Larry Page and Jeff Bezzos. John Haltiwanger and other researchers call them “high-growth” firms (companies that are adding jobs at a rate of more than 25% percent a year). These are the companies with huge impact in the economy and in innovation. As Andy Groove summarized in a 2010 essay about job creation:

Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.

Scaling is not easy. To make it right you need to invest in things that are not needed at the present but that become crucial in the future. You have to assume risks and shoot for the sky. You need to trust the people you recently hired and give new responsibilities to everyone (yes, everyone). The people you hire have to be motivated to take on new challenges and work under chaos. People and the company mature by the necessity of getting things done. And of course, you have to be successful in growing and delivering to your clients.

By the way, a great part of the “you” mentioned in the last paragraph, is meant for Netcentric’s board. The board members have been critical in scaling the company by using one key motivation: trust. They trusted us with recruiting, training, building technological infrastructure, rewarding programs, and everything that would take too long for approval. Why hire smart people if you have to tell them what to do, right?

That was another key factor:  if you want to increase motivation, hire motivated people. There is no easy way around that. “Recruiting is the most important activity that I do everyday”. I agree with Eric Schmidt.  Recruiting is key.  I have to admit that we are elitist. Our hiring process is not easy. We have at least three rounds of interviews. We work on problem assignments and have a hiring committee. The selection criteria is strict and explained to everybody who participates on hiring. This approach based on having a sound system for hiring motivated people has definitely been one of the key successes of scaling.

As an employee, I have many challenges and fears and, luckily, the former surpass the latter. The people whom I work with are eager to take on new responsibilities.  There are opportunities for trying new roles in the company, like front end, business analyst, project manager, and system engineering abound. I can create my internship in any of those areas even if I am not part of that discipline group. People proactively create new career pathways, propose new ways of doing things, and are key in pointing out deficiencies.

To help the company grow, coaching becomes a day to day activity. Coaches help others in their professional growth via quarterly, half-year, and yearly appraisals. There are roles such as coaches, buddies, and advocates. Coaches help career development. Advocates support needs and collect overall feedback received. The buddy program helps with the onboarding. And the process of onboarding was revamped to reduce the learning curve by introducing newcomers to how the company operates and review the different careers.

None of this was easy to achieve. None of the processes was set up from the beginning. Many mistakes were made. However, we follow an iterative approach. Our feedback loop is very short and when something does not work, it stands out immediately. People are very active in voicing concerns, in getting involved, in feeling part of the company. And that makes a difference.

I look back and do not regret my career change after working for the status quo. Netcentric continues to become more exciting every day. The fast pace and capacity to deliver our business goals is a key driver and magnet. And yes, besides all that, there is free coffee. Send me an email to mario.rodriguez@netcentric.biz if you would like to check it out.

Others ask for experience, we want your passion

Should experience be a predictor of capacity? I think Guardiola would object. This is a good story about an experiment going terribly right: the Netcentric Academy

(this is the original writing that was published here)

A year ago, the Netcentric director from the Barcelona office approached me with a crazy idea (he usually does that during the summer). He said: “Let’s get graduating students from the university and train them to become backend and frontend developers in three months.” He was really optimistic and certain that it would work. I, on the other hand, thought the dates were aggressive. Additionally, nobody had done it before and, as new experiences go, uncertainty gives away to fear and rejection. Several colleagues also feared getting inexperienced youngsters with no professional experience into our offices without being able to place them in projects facing the client. I am glad to tell you this is a story has a happy ending.

So we did not have much time to prepare. I was myself doubtful it was even possible. However, this is Netcentric, and we do things differently. We set to define the classes that were going to be taught, select the professors that were going to teach them, and the plan to follow. The first major obstacle was the opportunity cost in getting our own developers to teach classes. Therefore, we came up with a solution: let’s leave it open for the students to do their own project. The rest of the time, the students will receive a basic introduction to our building blocks. This decision turned out to be the key of succes. The project was the best part of the academy and allowed a good assessment of motivation, teamwork, and learning.

Things were not easy, though. From the start the resources were limited. Students were mostly gone for the summer. We did not even have office space to teach the classes, so we had to rent tables and chairs, and review the planning in sudoku fashion to align everybody’s requests. It was challenging but it worked. Each Netcentric person I approached showed his/her pride in what they do and willingness to participate.

Today we have more than 20 bright developers that have been onboarded into the company and with a high level of satisfaction from both the tech leads and the developers themselves.

It is not only passion that we asked, of course. Those selected showed a potential for deep analytical thinking and fast learning. They worked under little supervision and were able to be motivated and deliver high quality work in their projects. At the beginning, we debated much about motivation. Were those guys be able to attend a full 8-hour day of classes? Should we have a 6-hour day? Should we include motivating videos from code.org? Reality sometimes is better than fiction and the students did wonderfully, even arriving an hour earlier to have their daily stand-up and staying late to finish their work.

Several times I have asked the students who participated what was the factor of success. I would have never thought possible that level of commitment. The answers vary and everybody has their own reason. However, the most common response is that they wanted to prove how much they could do. I hope society in general would do the same: give a chance to the youth to show what they are capable of.