3 Shared Responsibilities for Startup Professionals

This is a slightly modified version of a Slack post that I had shared with the Rocketium team.

Originally published on LinkedIn in January 2016.

Most work in any organisation, formal or otherwise, gets done if it has a single owner. That is because things that have multiple owners usually end up having no owners at all.

That said, there are some responsibilities that are important enough for them to be owned by every single person in the organisation. Below are the three responsibilities that I think are important for all startup professionals. Please note that I am using "startup" in a loose sense to refer to an organisation that intends to run, grow, and take decisions as fast as a startup.

1. Customer Experience

Customer experience comes in many forms and guises - customer success, user experience, customer support, customer service, and plenty more. Whatever its name, customer experience is ultimately about ensuring that customers love using a company's products and keep coming back for more.

A complex interplay of things makes a great customer experience - usability, performance, availability, documentation, response time. Acting on feedback, anticipating needs, and solving pain points contribute just as much to customer experience as a well-designed app and website. Every action by every team member impacts customers in some way. And every team member needs to keep reminding themselves of this and strive to make every impact a positive one.

2. Quality

Maintaining a high bar for quality is a fundamental responsibility for all startup team members. A customer's experience with a product or a service has hundreds of tangible and intangible touchpoints. Each one is a chance to delight or disappoint customers. That is why a strong focus on quality at every level with a startup is important.

3. Growth

Growth is the height that a company reaches and the momentum with which it reaches it.

It is the towering structure built on top of the foundations of customer experience and quality. Growth, like customer experience and quality, is everyone's responsibility.

Is every team member telling everyone they know about the products they are building? Are they seeing potential users everywhere? Can they imagine unique features that will help take the product to many more people?

Without this sort of ownership, growth gets relegated to the product team, the marketing team, or (god forbid!) the "growth hacking" team.

Living these daily

So how does one go about creating a culture of shared responsibilities? How does everyone in the startup start living and breathing customer experience, quality, and quality? Below are the 4 way in which we do this at Rocketium.

1. Be a customer - It all starts with being a customer of one's own products. To empathise better with our customers, we need to put ourselves in their shoes. To find pain points and areas of improvement, we need to use our products regularly.

2. Be a perfectionist - Just using products is not enough. We need to demand more out of our ourselves and our team, sweat the details, and make even the smallest part of our product brings us joy.

3. Do not take no for an answer - Some things are hard, inconvenient, or time-consuming. It is easy to give up or move on to simpler challenges. If we want to create something great, we have to keep finding better ways to get things done.

4. Always remember the big picture - Everyone should wake up thinking about their company's mission and larger purpose. This is what should drive decision-making and be the moral compass. Without knowing the bigger picture, it is easy to build average products, give mediocre customer experience, and be happy with poor market share.