Keeping the Startup Spirit Alive in a Growing Company | Hacker News Reader

Keeping the Startup Spirit Alive in a Growing Company

bits.shutterstock.com

24 pointssethbannon18 comments

Dan McCormick, the author of this piece, is the reason Shutterstock has a great engineering culture. He puts people before everything else, and finds a way to let all kinds of different personalities and talents shine. He brings out the best in people.

The fact that he was allowed to keep doing what he was doing during their run-up to an IPO seems noteworthy. Folks like him are often pushed out. Maybe he shines so brightly nobody would dare?

A lot of what I read here reminds me of the Apple I joined 6 years ago. That's great to see other companies understand the value of small autonomous teams.

>At Shutterstock, we’ve delayed the reversion to an uninspired >mean by letting different teams and groups in the company >develop their own culture.

I worked for a growing tech company over the last 2 years - and was there while it grew from 30 to 150 people. I found that this was one of the most important things to keeping things fun and engaging. It felt like there were a bunch of little startups within a bigger startup.

The only downside thought was that people had divergent ideas of what our company culture really WAS. We hadn't done the work that Shutterstock probably has in defining our overall company values, brand, ideals etc.

I'm going through the startup growth path again and I'm curious to see what other people have seen work in scaling cultures in growing companies. Any big insights or observations from the HN hivemind?

That's basically the question I'm getting at below and am wondering about, how does that 6 person team structure scale when you get to be a 500-1000 person company.

Spotify has a great article on this, if you haven't seen it: http://ucvox.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/113617905-scaling-a...

Thanks for sharing!

I wonder what size exactly a "small" team is, especially if they contain "software engineers, Q.A. testers, user-experience developers and product owners." Somewhere around 25?

Nope, usually about 6 people: 2-3 devs, 1 tester, 1 UX, 1 PO.

Oh wow. How many teams do you think are at Shutterstock? And then how many teams can one manager manage basically? (just trying to get a feel for how the "middle management" starts to come up when the organization grows).

We have about 14 teams. The topic of management is a great one. We've shifted our approach over the years. That story might make a good blog article in itself. We've ended up with what's sometimes called a "matrix" structure, where people's day-to-day activities are based on what the team is doing, but each role (dev, tester, UX) reports into a manager (who's usually not on the team) with expertise in that domain. We've mostly avoided middle managers who only manage -- nearly all our managers are also on teams and, if they're devs, code. But we've also learned that having more than five direct reports can get pretty overwhelming, and so we've had to expand our org chart as we've grown for that reason.

Ok great, I think I understand that...but a full blog post would definitely clear it up (also I've finally figured out you're obviously at Shutterstock so can just ask direct questions).

Who decides what each team is going to be working on? Do tasks come down from the C-level guys, are you self-directed on what you want to work on, etc.?

Great questions! Each team has a specific domain -- we have a customer experience team, a contributor team, a search team, etc. Each team also has one or more stakeholders -- business folks that help set the high-level direction of the team. The teams work with their stakeholders (some of whom are super hands-on, others aren't) to pick 2-3 projects per quarter to focus on. We try to talk in terms of the problems each team should solve, and let the team itself work out the best solution.

It has taken us years to refine our process, and it's been a great journey. I'm happy to chat more about it with anyone -- hit me up at dan at shutterstock.com

Nice article. I particularly like the point about culture not changing... most startups definitely tend towards a more "corporate" feel as they grow which can suck the fun out of building cool stuff.

Let's talk more about the whisky tasting culture.

What would you like to know? :)

Never let them fly business class

Part of the job is keeping the wrong people out. That's how to keep them out. Http://a.sarva.co explains why

How is business class any different from any other perks like catering or laundry?

I'm tall. When I fly for business, I get extra legroom / business class or don't go.

sfo -> nyc: i'm giving the company an absolute shit 16 (round trip) hours of my life. So they're going to pay some money to make me less uncomfortable, and if that's a problem, I don't go. Bosses tend to react poorly to flat out refusal to travel except when it's reasonably comfortable but that's their problem. If making me miserable (and unproductive; I can't even fully open my laptop in coach) to save $700 is a problem, then fuck 'em.

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