The Builder's Guide to the Tech Galaxy

Learn to scale your startup with a roadmap to the all-important part of the business lifecycle between launch and IPO

In The Builder's Guide to the Tech Galaxy: 99 Practices to Scale Startups into Unicorn Companies, a team of accomplished investors, entrepreneurs, and marketers deliver a practical collection of concrete strategies for scaling a small startup into a lean and formidable tech competitor. By focusing on the four key building blocks of a successful company - alignment, team, functional excellence, and capital--this book distills the wisdom found in countless books, podcasts, and the authors' own extensive experience into a compact and accessible blueprint for success and growth.

In the book, you'll find:

• Organizational charts, sample objectives and key results (OKRs), as well as guidance for divisions including technology and product management, marketing, sales, people, and service operations
• Tools and benchmarks for strategically aligning your company's divisions with one another, and with your organization's "North Star"
• Templates and tips to attract and retain a triple-A team with the right scale-up mindset
• Checklists to help you attract growth capital and negotiate term sheets

Perfect for companies with two, ten, or one hundred employees, The Builder's Guide to the Tech Galaxy belongs on the bookshelves of founders, managers, entrepreneurs, and other business leaders exploring innovative and proven ways to scale their enterprise to new heights.

Auteur

Dr. Martin Schilling is an angel investor, startup builder, and scale-up executive. He has co-created and scaled five companies, including a McKinsey & Company subsidiary and the FinTech firm N26. He is the Managing Director of the Berlin Accelerator at Techstars.

Dr. Thomas Klugkist is a management consultant who leverages the experience and insight he gained working at leading companies and startups in Europe (N26, KPN/ Planet Internet, Klett Group, Kirch Group, JCI) to guide change processes and help exciting companies grow.

Contenu

Forewords (Building the Third Way) xix

Forewords (Preparing Europe for maturity) xxvii

Introduction xxix

North Star

1 Six Dimensions of Direction 3

Purpose beyond profit

Practice 1: A company that makes the planet a better place 6

Company values

Practice 2: Guiding principles for aligning the crew 8

Business ambition

Practice 3: Business outcomes to aspire to in the long run 10

North Star metric

Practice 4: The PRIMARY metric that matters NOW 11

Value proposition

Practice 5: Unmet customer needs that you solve uniquely well 12

OKRs

Practice 6: Making direction operational 16

2 Environmental, Social and Governance Criteria as Drivers of Business Success (With Johannes enhard and Hannah Leach) 21

Environmental

Practice 7: Measuring, reducing and offsetting your environmental footprint with clear responsibilities and targets 26

Social

Practice 8: Building a culture that embraces diversity and inclusion 29

Governance

Practice 9: Establishing internal governance that facilitates growth, compliance, and employee representation 32

People & Mindset

3 People (HR) Excellence (With Constanze Buchheim, Manjuri Sinha and Chris Bell) 37

OKRs

Practice 10: Establishing the right people OKRs 40

Organizational chart and roles

Practice 11: Defining the roles & responsibilities for a people function 46

Practice 12: Scaling the right people roles at the right time 49

Recruiting & candidate experience

Practice 13: Building the candidate sourcing muscle 50

Practice 14: Evaluating candidates in record time while creating an outstanding candidate experience 55

Practice 15: Boosting the offer acceptance rates 57

Organizational development

Practice 16: Establishing a strong job architecture with clear levels, career paths and tracks 58

Practice 17: Putting fair appraisal and promotion processes in place 62

Employee experience

Practice 18: Driving employee happiness by enabling meaning, mastery, psychological safety, autonomy and community 64

Employee stock option programs

Practice 19: Building the right employee stock option program 67

4 Scale-Up Mindset (With Johannes Lenhard) 73

Obsession with customer experience

Practice 20: Improving key customer journey experiences as a top priority for leaders 74

Impossible is nothing

Practice 21: Setting impossible-is-nothing goals by thinking "and," not "or" 77

Learn-it-all beats know-it-all

Practice 22: Embracing learning cycles by establishing psychological safety and an idea meritocracy 80

Autonomy to act

Practice 23: Empowering cross-functional teams to make decisions rapidly & independently 82

Functional Excellence In Scale-Ups

5 Product Management Excellence

(With Johnny Quach and Sven Grajetzki) 87

OKRs

Practice 24: Establishing the right product OKRs 90

Organizational chart and roles

Practice 25: Defining the roles & responsibilities for a product function 96

Practice 26: Scaling the right product roles at the right time 100

Product vision & direction

Practice 27: Developing a clear product vision and deriving your roadmap from it 102

Practice 28: Focusing your product organization on outcomes, not just designing a "feature factory" 104

Practice 29: Investing in the core product while pushing adjacent opportunities and venture bets 106

Product development process

Practice 30: Creating a crystal clear picture of your target customers 107

Practice 31: Aligning your product value proposition with the underserved needs of your customers 108

Practice 32: Developing your roadmap as a communication tool with the right prioritization logic 111

Product management basics

Practice 33: Getting the brand and product design right early on 115

Practice 34: Building a thriving user research engine quickly 119

Practice 35: Implementing best-in-class product management tools 122

6 Technology Excellence (With Christoph Richter) 129

OKRs

Practice 36: Establishing the right technology OKRs 132

Organizational chart and roles

Practice 37: Defining the roles & responsibilities for a technology function 140

Practice 38: Scaling the right technology roles at the right time 144

Your way of agile development

Practice 39: Creating your own version of agile development 145

Development operations (DevOps)

Practice 40: Establishing lean software development principles 150

Practice 41: Establishing technical DevOps practices for continuous delivery 153

Practice 42: Enabling a team of doers through the right DevOps culture 156

Scalable architecture

Practice 43: Creating a "good enough" software architecture that can evolve over time 158

Practice 44: Establishing a resilient cloud architecture 161

Information security

Practice 45: Mitigating the top 10 web applications' security risks 163

Practice 46: Integrating the key information security practices into design, development and deployment early on 165

Data management

Practice 47: Democratizing data with self-service data tools while building a scalable data architecture 167

7 B2C Marketing Excellence (With Kelly Ford) 175

OKRs

Practice 48: Establishing the right marketing OKRs 177

Organizational chart and roles

Practice 49: Defining the roles & responsibilities for a marketing function 182

Practice 50: Scaling the right marketing roles at the right time 185

Marketing basics

Practice 51: Establishing a single source of truth for key marketing and growth KPIs 186

Practice 52: Bridging the gap between marketing quants and creative brains 186

Practice 53: Equipping your teams with the right marketing and growth tools 187

Practice 54: Finding your product-channel fit qu…