How to Double Your Company’s Growth Every Year

Xtreme Labs · February 7, 2013 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/2d75

Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering at Xtreme Labs, Gives Three Recommendations

By Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering, Xtreme Labs

 

Managing a fast-growing company can be a rewarding and daunting experience. On the one hand, you want to preserve the same company culture that helped you get to this point, while on the other, you recognize that a 100 person team cannot function in the same ways as a five-person startup.

 

Since joining Xtreme Labs in 2009 as VP of Engineering, I have watched the company grow to over 200 employees. Based on my experience, here are three tips that helped us grow consistently, efficiently and effectively.

 

Hire fast, fire faster

 

This mantra comes from entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster.

 

Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance. Candidates often test as false positives and false negatives. For example, a candidate could have the ideal skill-set for the position, but may not have put her best foot forward in a two-hour interview. When companies ask coding questions, expect answers on whiteboards, and disqualify for giving the wrong answer, they are forgetting this:

 

Most people don’t write code on whiteboards

 

In other words, this scenario sets the candidate up to fail because it forces her to use a method that few engineers use in their regular workday.

 

The opposite may also happen: she may have mastered the interview, but is an incompatible fit in skills or culture. How do you counteract these scenarios?

 

Don’t drop the concept of a defined interview process altogether. Instead, recognize that interviews aren’t perfect. Ask challenging questions that try to establish how the candidate thinks, and don’t disqualify someone for giving the wrong answer.

 

Organize your work environment to be a good indicator of whether or not an individual is a good fit relatively quickly. This is a better predictor of performance because it uses real in-work data instead of interview data. Instead of trying to create questions that elicit a symptom of fit, build performance indicators directly into the culture and work experience.

 

The reason most companies don’t do this is because they don’t have a really tough post-hiring process to filter people out after they’ve joined. A lot of companies follow a “hire slow, fire fast” mentality, which involves an extremely rigorous interview process but often results in throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

 

Instead of using the interview as the proxy for performance, use an internship or a few months of work experience, which is much more valid real-world data. Recognize that “the map is not the territory”: a great interviewee is not equivalent to a great employee.

 

Monotasking = efficiency

 

Over the past few years, it has become normal for people to do many things at the same time. Now, we're starting to go overboard with it.

 

Emphasize doing one thing at a time. In multitasking, the time it takes to switch between tasks, also known as the context switch, becomes extremely expensive as more and more tasks are attempted simultaneously. When you consider context switching costs in aggregate, it’s clear that multitasking wastes a lot of time.

 

Implement processes like pair programming that allow your engineers to monotask. Teams of two that are accountable to each other are less likely to get distracted by e-mail, the internet, and social networks. Consider organizing an open, agile team room where everyone can see what others are up to.

 

People often think the end-goal is to be the most efficient multitasker possible. They take joy, and relief, in catching up on their e-mails during a meeting. However, multitasking often leads to messing two things up simultaneously. Should they be rewarded for this behavior?

 

Don’t let the calendar dictate when to meet

 

It’s extremely difficult to have an effective 1:1 meeting: people are busy and often don’t prepare for it properly. An effective 1:1 requires both sides to be in the right mindset and to queue up topics, which requires regular bookkeeping. However, these factors usually don’t coincide in the real world, and the answer why is simple:

 

A career reflection moment is unlikely to happen during a scheduled 1:1

 

When an issue arises, fix it right away. Being available to host an unscheduled 1:1 meeting means setting time aside from a regular workday for employees to grab you for a chat while the topic and context are fresh. It’s also possible to combine the merits of an unscheduled 1:1 with a 15 or 20-minute lag time in order for both sides to prepare properly.

 

As companies grow in size, co-ordination costs increase. More people require more communication. One potential alternative to unscheduled 1:1s is to host scheduled 1:1s, and have people cancel the meetings if neither side needs it. When it boils down, everyone has their own management style, and it is up to whatever works for each individual manager.

 

Final thoughts

 

Though our processes work in practice, we’re not sure they work in theory. We don’t rely on research; instead, we’ve implemented these processes through heuristics, and our success is a testament to our methodologies.

 

Filtering out candidates post-hire, monotasking, and unscheduled 1:1s, are just a few of the principles we’ve used at Xtreme Labs to keep up our growth for the past five years. If you’re managing a fast-growing company, we hope they come in handy for you too.

 

Named one of “Toronto’s Top 25 Most Powerful People, Farhan Thawar is a well-known and respected figure in the Canadian tech community. Before joining the Xtreme team, Farhan held positions of Chief Software Architect at I Love Rewards, the Head of Search & MSN Platform for Microsoft Canada and Technical Lead at Trilogy Software. In addition to being a programming and engineering guru for Xtreme Labs, Farhan also uses his wealth of industry and mobile expertise to mentor aspiring mobile and tech startups. 

 

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