Organisations depend on processes - they explain the way we do things.
You could think of a process as “If this happens, then do that, and then this, and then that.”
As a team our processes exist in two places:
the "Playbooks" (policies, documents, briefs) we produce for each area of work that's done. These usually explain how to do tasks in the most efficient way possible.
the systems we use, for example, trello boards that visualise the process by having lists for To Do, In Progress, Amends Required, Done.
2 types of process
As a startup, some of our processes have been tried and tested; we know that they work and they are therefore the way we want to do things going forwards.
Other tasks are experimental. We know what we want to achieve but we don't necessarily know the best way to get there. In these scenarios we want you to be experimental. Other words for this are Lean or Agile. It's about doing things as quick experiments so you can test with a small sample and then iterate or continue or expand.
An example
Let's look an example.
Imagine your task is to bake 5 cakes at Makerble but we have never baked cakes before.
In our playbook we might say that the process is
(1) mix the ingredients,
(2) put in oven,
(3) add icing decoration to the top of the cake.
If you worked in a large company and you were just a small cog in a big machine, you would probably start by doing stage 1 for ALL 5 cakes.
You would do all the mixing first.
Then you would put all five cake mixes into the oven at the same time.
Then you would decorate all the cakes at the end.
This is an EFFICIENT approach and it is fine to do this when you know exactly how to achieve the task. I.e. the process has been tried & tested.
But in a startup we have new ideas all the time and as we've said, we've never made a cake like this before.
So actually what you should do is follow the process from start to finish but for only ONE cake at a time.
That way you can see the result of following the process from the first cake, and then you can iterate by amending the process slightly for the second cake if you need to.
By reviewing the results of each cake you bake, the next cake will become better and better.
This is how startups use iteration to constantly improve and it's one of the key principles that separates Startup culture from Big Corporate culture.
