Jeff Haynie provides five steps to build great teams: 1) Communicate often and early to share strategic goals and updates; 2) Empower teams to solve problems by defining success metrics and celebrating wins and failures; 3) Measure key metrics, iterate based on feedback, and continuously improve; 4) Facilitate collaboration through memorable off-site events; 5) As the team scales, maintain the startup culture by incentivizing people and focusing on their well-being.

1. H O W T O B U I L D
G R E AT T E A M S
J E F F H AY N I E
@ J H AY N I E

2. F I V E I M P O R TA N T S T E P S
M Y H U M B L E A D V I C E …

3. who am i?
💰 serial tech entrepreneur living in silicon valley having
started 4 venture capital backed startups
🚀 angel investor in numerous startups
💀 writing software for 30 years
💩 i’ve failed way more than i’ve succeeded at this

4. S T E P 1
Communicate often and early

5. Communicate often and early
✓ Have a strategic message that gets repeated to the
entire company often
✓ What’s our purpose?
✓ Why does it matter?
✓ What’s the long term opportunity?
✓ What are we doing in the immediate term to get
there?

6. Communicate often and early
✓ Provide more detail and specificity as you
communicate down in the organization
✓ What’s our role to play in the bigger picture?
✓ How are we going to accomplish our part?
✓ Why what we’re doing matters?
✓ What and when do we we need to accomplish in the
near term?

7. Communicate often and early
✓ Provide various types of communication appropriate
for different mediums
✓ People consume content differently
✓ Helps reinforce the bigger picture message
✓ Slack is great for instant consumption, not perfect
for strategic messaging
✓ If unsure, do it verbally and reinforce with a written
follow-up

8. Communicate often and early
✓ Get out any bad or unpleasant news as quickly as
possible
✓ Your culture knows before you think they do
✓ Treat everyone like adults and with respect
✓ Give them context along with facts
✓ Be honest and direct

9. S T E P 2
Empower your team to solve important problems

10. Empower your team to solve important problems
✓ With a well understand strategic plan, your team can
be empowered to solve real problems
✓ Give them the space to “find solutions” that can be
solved
✓ Easy to direct work, harder to allow solutions to be
found to real problems … but that’s the point
✓ Focus on how you “measure success” — usually the
how doesn’t matter as much

11. Empower your team to solve important problems
✓ “what and how” changes, but “why” usually doesn’t:
✓ The bigger picture matters … “why are we trying to
achieve what we’re working on?”
✓ I usually provide a “and then if we achieve this, here’s
what is likely to happen”. If-then logic can help:
✓ “if we are able to get these 3 important features
done, it will unlock the ability to sell our solution
into the public sector. by doing that, it will expand
our market opportunity by 3-fold”

12. Empower your team to solve important problems
✓ Important problems have well-defined success metrics:
✓ Try and provide tangible metrics that everyone can
understand:
✓ “If we are able to build out the features necessary
to unlock the public sector, we believe it represents
a new ACV of at least $5M next year which would
put us over our target by 35%”
✓ Business changes, so make sure you communicate
progress (good or bad)

13. Empower your team to solve important problems
✓ Create culture that celebrates success and acknowledges failures:
✓ Make sure you take time to celebrate wins, even if minor
✓ If you’re not failing, you’re not taking enough risks and playing
it too safe:
✓ Make sure you acknowledge things you’ll do better or
improve upon next time
✓ You can’t “hit the ball if you don’t take a swing” - set a tone
for the culture that “you’re going to miss more than you hit,
but you only have to hit 1/3 to make it to the Baseball Hall
of Fame”

14. S T E P 3
Measure, Iterate and Improve

15. Measure, Iterate and Improve
✓ One of my favorite mantras and core values.
✓ Startups are uniquely positioned to do the impossible
because:
✓ Typically don’t have their own legacy to protect
✓ Can move fast
✓ Feedback cycles can be short and iterative
✓ Take advantage of your ability to change and course
correct fast

16. Measure, Iterate and Improve
✓ On measuring things:
✓ Pick a few number of well understood metrics
✓ If you’re at 100% on your metrics (and I don’t mean
uptime or SLA!), you’re either (a) picking the wrong
things to measure or (b) you have a “place it safe”
culture
✓ Target ~75-80% achievement. Realize you’re it’s
more important to course correct and miss, than to
hit it and sail in the wrong direction

17. Measure, Iterate and Improve
✓ On iteration:
✓ You should start small and iterate.
✓ In engineering we call this “don’t prematurely optimize”.
In business, don’t execute something:
✓ The biggest killer of most startups is premature scaling
(spend more money, hire the wrong people, go after the
wrong market, etc).
✓ Do something small and unsatisfying and if it works, you’ll
know what you need to do next …

18. Measure, Iterate and Improve
✓ On improving:
✓ Acknowledge that there will be a better way and
find time in your planning to refactor
✓ STOP doing things that don’t work or are
suboptimal !! It’s OK. You don’t need to create
legacy.
✓ Only optimize once you’ve “figured it out”. Do
things initially that aren’t scalable

19. S T E P 4
Facilitate collaboration in memorable ways

20. Facilitate collaboration in memorable ways
✓ Slack is great, but …..
✓ Try and create memorable experiences as part of
the journey which will help create strong bonds
between team mates
✓ I really like team off-sites and “planning weeks”
✓ Try and cultivate unusual connections between
people in different groups (sales + engineering,
marketing + finance, etc)

21. Facilitate collaboration in memorable ways
✓ People always tell stories about favorite events:
✓ During tough times (which you will have), people will
remember bonds built at different events
✓ Helps lubricate stronger working relationships
especially team-to-team when people have bonded
outside of normal day-to-day
✓ Doesn’t have to be expensive or glamorous. Some of
the best events we had were Boche ball during
engineering week

22. Facilitate collaboration in memorable ways
✓ Culture is intentional, but needs to be genuine:
✓ Different cultures have different norms, different things that
work or don’t so be sensitive to that.
✓ Create intentional activities that the company as a whole rallies
around and be consistent in planning and execution.
✓ people will tell stories like: “remember at the last planning
week where Chris and Tony refactored the entire CLI one
evening?”
✓ Be mindful of professionalism (try and limit the “party at any
expense” culture) around events and communicate it.

23. Facilitate collaboration in memorable ways
✓ Try and treat remote teams and local teams (as best you can) the
same:
✓ Timezone differences are very hard to accommodate all. Be
mindful of global events that force other timezones to stay up late
or get up early. Do some activities at HQ at an unusual timezone
to accommodate another geo and be intentional about it.
✓ If you have free snacks and unlimited drink options at HQ, make
sure you have the same in your remote locations.
✓ Make sure your remote employees visit HQ at least once per year
and spend quality time with people outside their normal day-to-
day team.

24. S T E P 5
Make it all about the People

25. Make it all about the People
✓ At a certain scale, be intentional with how you
execute:
✓ What works when you’re 10 people in one room,
doesn’t work at 100 people in different locations.
Recognize that and be intentional around execution
✓ Assumptions don’t scale
✓ You can still keep that startup culture as you scale,
but it goes from being organic to systematic

26. Make it all about the People
✓ As you scale, you’ll bring in a lot of people that are
designed to remove risk from the organization:
✓ Accounting, HR, Security, Legal, etc. — all wonderful
and important roles to play, but designed to remove
risk (and thus can be seen to stunt speed)
✓ Incentives matter. Make sure you’re thoughtful
about how people are compensated, how they are
rewarded and what their mission is. People are good
at maximizing reward

27. Make it all about the People
✓ In the end, all of this is ultimately about the people:
✓ Your culture is way more in tune with how things are
vs. how you want them to be
✓ Companies are made up of people from all walks of
life (hopefully!) and different experiences to draw
from … make that your differentiator
✓ Create a culture where people treat each other like
they want to be treated. It starts at the top.

28. Let’s Review
Communicate early and often
Empower your team to solve
important problems
Measure, Iterate and Improve
Facilitate collaboration in
memorable ways
Make it all about the People