Things that I learned from working in a small start-up tech company

I started working in / being a shareholder in a tech start-up company at the beginning of this year. It has been a roller coaster journey. To introduce my team, we originally had 3 co-founders, 2 interns, and 1 stray cat, me. The major difficulties I experienced were from lack of process and communication. I am not venting about negative energy but just trying to find insight from this experience and probably lay a foundation for myself in the future if I want to start my own business. Here are the learnings:

1. Lack of documentation

I would say this is the biggest issue I have seen so far. As a start-up, it is common to have changing ideas every now and then and we need to be able to adapt to the agility of development surely. But when it comes to documentation. I am talking about basic meeting notes and company mission and strategy documentation. What are the long-term missions the company wants to achieve? What are the short-term priorities the company wants to prioritize? And what is the status of the development? Those all happen randomly by instant messaging apps or verbally in meetings. More importantly, after every meeting, the next step is not documented, so we forget about things all the time.

Since I joined the team, we have formed a process that we will have meeting notes for every meeting and summarize the next steps immediately at the end of the meetings. Ping relevant people if there is anything needed from them. Furthermore, I have initiated creating a confluence working space where we started to document at least short-term product strategy and priorities within the next 6 months. This helped so much when synchronizing with the entire team by sending them the confluence page about something unclear to them.

2. Lack of process

When there are a limited amount of people in the team, sometimes it's really easy just to override some steps or persons with specific tasks. I suffered the most with the product test/release process. Normally based on my previous working experience, when a product is ready to be tested or ready to be released, the engineer will always first involve the product manager to do an acceptance test. At this step, the product manager will compare what has been written in the user flow documentation with the actual output of the product to see if all the user flows have been fully developed and are as expected. But in this start-up, the engineer normally just quitely releases a test version or production version with only DM with the CEO. I as the person who delivered some documentation before development, have no idea whether the product has been developed as expected or not. There was one time, when I even found out our application crashed and didn't know when and why this happened. I guess this can call back to my other blog about the power dynamic between the CEO and product manager is very hard to balance. I wanted to have my own advocacy for my idea but at the same time CEO is the reason why this company exists now and I don't know how to convince myself that I can contribute more.

But luckily that specific engineer left the team eventually, so now we can have more flexibility and time to set up a good product release process when the next developer is on board.

3. As co-founders, you need to have control of the property (no matter physical or virtual)

This I learned the hard way. I am not the CEO. Just as an observer. We had a drama not long ago. As I mentioned in the beginning, we had a CTO who is in charge of writing code and maintaining IT-related stuff like Google Workspace. I didn't know until the end of July that the CTO holds all the access to the database and application source code and he NEVER EVER shared with anyone else in the company. This gave him the ultimate power to use those as hostages if he wanted anything. Not to blame anyone in the whole thing, I just feel like as a standard management protocol, the technology access should be controlled or managed mutually by all the co-founders and put the right to use of those into shareholder agreement to prevent similar things in the future. It's one thing to have trust in people, but it's another thing to deal with preventing anyone from using company property as a weapon.

I have observed so far the things listed above about what to improve in a start-up. I hope I will be able have my ideal start-up company soon and try to avoid those mistakes in the future.

Thanks for reading my blod.