Document your journey in your startup
Startup is a roller coaster journey and every founding team needs to focus more on the immediate pressure/need, and most seem to miss out on documenting their 'early' journey. I saw this happening in my own startup and saw this in dozens of fellow founders too.
I will be correcting it in my next startup and recommend the same to all the new/current founders.
Documenting your journey helps:
-Shaping your culture
-Recording your experiments
-Avoiding assumptions and/or bias
-Building transparency across the organization
-Remembering serendipities
-Recording key inputs and data from market, customer and industry over the years
and more
Document all meetings
Have a functional level or org level meeting log which records the discussion, and (dis)agreed thoughts/inputs from the key sessions.
You can use a pure text-based documentation /markup documentation to build better context (using Notion /Roam Research) or video record it. I prefer Notion and Loom for the above.
You will be surprised by the depth of thinking and analysis when you revisit five years from now. Your team decision making and thought process will be super. There are no rooms for confusion, and you will have a ready set of data to course-correct too.
Document OKR /Goal/ Metrics
If you are using OKR /any other model, document everything and make it visible for all employees. Let all the team members (& stakeholders) know what was agreed and align all work keeping OKR in mind.
Document All-Hands
During your monthly/quarterly/yearly all-hands meeting, document everything your team presented/ discussed.
Document 1–1 meeting with team members
1-1 meeting/lunch among management to team members, investors to management teams, key leadership team members, and all such 1-1 lunch meetings are informal and very personal at times.
However, keeping personal things private during this 1-1 meeting, you need to encourage your team members to share their minds. Gather critical insights or parallel inputs their views about the business. Document these anonymously/with consent.
Document Customer Feedback & Testimonials
Ask any startup to share their feedback log or testimonial log; you will be surprised how this very haphazardly managed.
Your team must thoroughly document all customer inputs without removing certain parts based on your assumptions/bias or pattern-matching.
Document Key Milestones
Document your key milestones, whether you reached $1k ARR or $500k ARR.
Document Team Member Profile
This is a major missing among many startups, including in my previous startup. While we celebrate new team members joining with a party, we must document their profiles in their own words. Keep celebrating their participation in your journey. You should keep this updated when a team member moves on too.
Document The Journey Book
Start jotting down key happenings in your company. Share this journey book with your team, while hiring (&onboarding) and stakeholders. Your journey book is your culture, passion, failures, success, and ambitions.
Resources
I have been compiling and keeping various templates & resources in my website. Have a look 👉 https://santoshpanda.com/9869ee16acc34abfb63557bab0e0c88d
I will be adding more such resources on https://santoshpanda.com/knowledgebase
Do share your thoughts and also awesome templates/resources you might be using.
PS: I had written this post in my medium, but this post is the latest and updated one!