It’s often said that startups are a chaotic environment and anyone building one will attest to it. But people are fucking lying if they say chaos doesn’t exist in larger companies. It’s different yes but chaos is inherent to life. The difference for me is that in smaller companies everyone sees all the ups and downs of the rollercoaster. The chasms you have to cross (reference) are more frequent and your total momentum as a company is lower. What this looked at at 900 people was normally; changing priorities, consequential re-orgs, multiple teams working to achieve competing goals at times etc. How this looks now for me is commonly; changing priorities, discovering more about our ideal customer persona (ref), critical feature requests etc. Both settings overlap just in different ways and scales. But how can you tell when you’re straying into unmanaged, dangerous chaos versus productive, harnessed chaos and what should you do?
Firstly, everyone’s version of good and bad is different so apply critical thinking here. My take on harmful chaos is when these factors feel true:
You’re unintentionally dropping and changing priorities
You can’t point to a desired medium or long term future state
There are significant factors (tech/design/product debt) preventing you from achieving your goals
No doubt you can list out more but at that point you’re beating a dead horse. You’re living in unmanaged chaos already. As it might be expected you can essentially invert the bad factors to classify good chaos but instead I’d prefer to talk about the value of good chaos.
If everything in life was predictable and you knew the next thing that was going to happen it’d be very fucking boring. No up or down, just flat. Chaos in life and work is what brings about chances for you to say yes to unexpected opportunities that alter your trajectory, hopefully for the good. Wether you want it or not, chaos will happen to you and you have the opportunity to utilise it.
Back to the startup though. To avoid feeling overwhelmed or drowning in chaos I try to apply these tools:
Vision
If you don’t know where you’re going, surprise surprise, you won’t make it to your desired destination. This doesn’t have to be a huge doc or deck. It needs to be compelling enough for you to care about it and a way to remember it. It helps anchor you in the long term and is the most important part for me of managing chaos.
Focus
Many people have covered this already because it truly is one of the most effective tools in your arsenal and the hardest to do right all the time. People are complex. Multiple people trying to achieve a goal isn’t an additive operation but exponential. In Solidroad, focus has been learning to say no to potential customers when we’re default dead because they aren’t in our target customer profile. It’s so we then can say yes when the time is right. Easy to say, hard to do when it’s money on the line and you’re burning cash (apply critical thinking as sometimes this is ok to do).
Smallest next step
The last tool I’ll suggest is to focus on the smallest next step of what you need to achieve towards your vision. Ignore everything else temporarily. L to avoid being overwhelmed or distracted. Take that step, look around for feedback, digest, iterate and then look for that next step. While it’s corny to say that every incredible feat started with one small step it’s also true so shed whatever shame/fear/self doubt you have about it an recognise its value.
Small note: I don’t mention goals or plans since everyone likes to manage it differently. Personally I like to utilise goals on multiple time horizons and spend the time writing my thoughts on it to. I highly value writing (a great read on why writing).
Life and startups are hard so try these tools or compartmentalise the trauma and keep going. Staying alive gives you the greatest chances of success.
Thanks for reading