Biggest risks

Introduction

We frequently get asked questions like:

• What are the biggest risks to the company?

• What are your top concerns?

• What are your biggest fears?

• What keeps you up at night?

On this page, we document the biggest risks and how we intend to mitigate them. We also have a biggest tailwinds page to see what waves we are riding in our current market.

1. Confusion about the expected output

As we add more layers of management to accommodate the new people, it's easy to become confused about what is expected of you.

To make sure this is clear we:

1. Document who is the DRI on a decision.

2. Have clear KPIs across the company

3. Have Key Meetings

4. Have each job family include specific performance indicators

5. Have a clear org-chart where each individual reports to exactly one person

6. Have managers regularly ask team members if they understand job expectations and close any gaps in understanding.

7. Ensure that at least 90% of the population responds favourably to the Engagement Survey question "I know what is expected of me to be successful."

8. We put our attention in celebrating our output instead of input, per our results value.

2. Loss of the values that bind us

It's easy for a culture to get diluted if an company is growing fast. To make our values stronger, we:

1. Regularly add to them and update them

2. Find new ways to reinforce our values

3. It's possible that a lack of diversity, one of our values, could lead to building a product that is not inclusive. To mitigate this, we have many DIB initiatives, including diversity goals in leadership and throughout.

4. If you lose the values that bind an company, you lose the ability to coordinate. For example, take our Iteration value. If one person is iterating, and they have a minimal, ugly feature that they wish to add, while another person who came from another company insists that 'This is nowhere near finished!,' you have a conflict.

5. It's not that one approach is better than the other. It's about aligning. You set the company up for a lot of conflict if you don't have shared values.

3. Lack of performance management

In a similar vein, it is important that we do not slow down, which means being very proactive in addressing under performance. We should identify and take action as early as possible.

4. Loss of the open source community

Keep our promises

Keep listening

Have contributing organisations

5. Loss of velocity

Most companies start shipping more slowly as they grow. To keep our pace, we need to:

Ensure we get [insert goal per team member here] per month

6. Loss of customer centricity

As more folks work away from students, it is easy to lose sight of whom we are serving. We can address this by:

1. living out our customer results value

2. product managers continuing to do customer validation cycles

3. dogfooding so we experience the same pain points our students do

7. Lowering the hiring bar

As we continue to grow our company, there is pressure on departments to meet their hiring targets. It is better for us to miss our targets than to hire people who won't be able to perform to our standards since that takes much longer to resolve. To ensure the people we hire make the company better, we:

1. Have a standard interview structure

2. Have a standard scoring system within a function; in other words, a "Strong Yes" should mean the same thing to every interviewer in Marketing.

3. Ensure that interviewers are scoring candidates consistently. Some teams are actively doing this

4. Review the interview scores of new hires to look for trends

5. Identify and take action on underperformance

6. Review cohort performance in the company (completion of onboarding tasks,performance review, 360 feedback, performance indicators)

8. Ineffective onboarding

We are onboarding many people quickly, making it easy for things to fall behind. Therefore we:

Measure the onboarding time

Make sure we work handbook-first, so the handbook is up to date.

9. Security breach

Maintain a strong Security Operations

Ensure our students complete secure IT training

10. Economic Downturn

Maintains a healthy amount of cash on our balance sheet

Makes short term commitments so we can correct course easily

Is as small as we can be, while still being able to execute our vision

Can slow operating expense growth to match any decline in revenue, if required

COVID-19 and impact of a pandemic:

1. We have the tools and culture to work from home and be productive during this unprecedented time of COVID-19.

2. Here are the things we can do at Techmission counter this risk:

3. Empower our team members to take care of themselves and their family so we keep them safe

4. When speaking with clients, lead with empathy and help support their transition to remote

11. Founder Departure

Often startups struggle through the transition when founders leave the company, especially when those founders also serve as the MD.

To ensure we avoid this risk we:

1. Built a highly capable servant team.

2. Actively discourage a cult of personality around our MD

3. Have the MD take normal vacations

4. Actively help the MD grow with the company, including training, coaching, and feedback

12. Handbook Second

We work Handbook First. As we say,

Having a "handbook first" mentality ensures there is no duplication; the handbook is always up to date, and others are better able to contribute.

If we work handbook second, we risk losing these benefits.

To ensure we avoid this risk, we:

1. Ensure all new hires read and understand the communication guidelines, as part of their onboarding

2. Make the ability to coach team members to work handbook first a requirement for promotion to Director or above

3. Explicitly ask MD Shadows to promote working handbook first

4. Empower all team members to help promote our communication guidelines

13. Key people leave

Techmission’s success will create growth opportunities for team members inside and outside of the company.

Company size

Alternatively, early team members may leave because working at a company the size of TM today or the size of TM in a year is different than working at an early-stage startup. Big companies are organizationally different than small startups, but there are many things about the spirit of a startup that we can maintain, notably:

1. our high ambition

2. our iteration value

3. keeping up velocity

4. our direct communication practices

5. Keeping the feel of a small startup, despite a growing headcount, may help retain employees who would otherwise leave.

14. Innovation and creativity are stifled

As the number of layers increase and middle management layers increase, innovation and creativity are stifled. While this could be reflected in loss of velocity, innovation is also about the ideas that are being brought to the table.

In addition to keeping our hiring bar high, we have the benefit of our community to help bring new insights and use cases creating issues. We can keep this momentum by continuing to value and engage with our community. We have proposal Request Coaches who help contributors to get their proposal requests to meet the contribution acceptance criteria, and wider community contributions per release is a Techmission KPI.

15. Loss of great overall experience

Due to the breadth of our scope, and the fact that our teams work in isolation in stages and groups, there is a risk that the end-to-end experience in the application will break down.

In order to avoid this negative outcome, we:

1. Have research team interview personas to ensure a good end-to-end workflow for specific persona types.

2. Ensure adequate leadership that is focused across the entire experience.

16. Ineffective Management

Ineffective management could lead to decreased team member retention and team member satisfaction, as well as make functioning difficult.

In order to address this, we:

1. Maintain the minimum number of layers to be effective

2. Train, coach, and publicly recognise good management

3. Set goals for management success (helping managers become great managers)

17. Setting expectations incorrectly

If we don't set targets appropriately and communicate about those expectations effectively, team members, investors, and other community members may not understand how we're performing. Missing a super-high goal while achieving really, really high results is still something to be acknowledged and celebrated. We need to set and communicate targets that both drive the highest possible results and also ensure constituents understand the business results and in context.

18. Inability to respond to technological change

Our value of iteration keeps us from marrying ourselves to timelines and features that get planned years before development.

19. Functional Silos

Techmission is a functionally organised company. Projects in GED are worked on by GED students. Projects in Interns are worked on by Interns. This could lead to functional silos, which could lead to loss of efficiency, duplicate work, or miscommunication.

We mitigate functional silos by encouraging cross-functional communication and relationship-building through:

1. Being public by default, enabling all functions to have simultaneous visibility into OKRs, direction, issues, and milestones within the handbook.

2. Coffee chats.

3. Social Call