Pause/Rewind: 2019 — building blocks
Taking the profits of lacking focus, or say, finding the right blocks
Rewinding… you know, takes a while…
Upfront note: as I was writing the article I was fighting with myself to decide if this was going to be a KI group Portugal (the group of companies I’m leading with KI labs, grow.inc and xgeeks) or a personal Pause/Rewind. Since they’re so interconnected I simply gave up. So… expect a mix of my own view with some KI’s insights! You can blame me later on how bad I’m organizing my thoughts :(
Is there a better year than 2019 to be the most challenging year of the decade? Hell it was! Since we’re all about being a data driven organization at KI let’s start with some numbers reflecting solely the companies in Portugal
Business
- 6.6x YOY revenue growth (from 300k to 2M)
- 2 new ventures bootstrapped in the group, already profitable
- 1 high scale venture being built intensively for more than 12 months together with a major global enterprise
- 75% of the people’s time allocated to client projects
- Since we began to date, 60% of our employees are working from 6 months to 18 months dedicated to a single project, 40% working less than 6 months in the same project
People
- 8/10 in employee engagement score
- 4% annual employee turnover rate (in total 1 employee, our mate left to be one of the youngest Member of Parliament in the history of Portugal)
- High recruitment bar with only 3% of the people who joined the hiring pipeline receiving an offer, from the ones receiving the offer 87% of them accepted
- ~4.3x YOY team growth, on average 3 new members every month — from 9 to 39 employees
- Team breakdown of 12,82% people experience and 87,18% product, engineering and design
- ~65% of our employees age from 25–34, ~35% above 34
- 2 new office spaces completed, 3rd one about to finish
For the ones really trying to make sense of the numbers, one can say we have gone through a totally unfocused, risky and crazy growth. Really, how can someone be bootstrapping 2 ventures (grow.inc spaces and xgeeks), while consolidating an existing one created in the second half of 2018 (KI labs Lisbon)? How can you grow 4x in people, without a proper employee lifecycle defined + no people available to think about it because everyone is allocated to client projects ? Most important, how can someone feel happy in this chaos ?
“Culture eats process for breakfast” — Peter Drucker
Not that we don’t believe in the value processes bring, we’ll get to that later, but we strongly believe that culture > process and culture in the end, is all about the people you have onboard. Lucky or not, I’m pretty sure every single person working by my side is a brilliant non jerk :)
Now, rewinding to the events this year that made the group reach the numbers above.
xgeeks is founded
While KI labs Lisbon is focusing more in early stages, product discovery, process setup and ramp up of the ventures we’re building for our clients, demanding more software engineering generalists, product design and product management know how. We identified a clear demand for engineering execution capacity and specialized talent from KI labs clients that were going through a scaling and product optimization phase.
Picking up this hypothesis xgeeks was founded in the group to focus in later stages for execution in bigger teams and specialized talent. Just in Q1, we were able to attract 10 engineers and onboard them into products, some going through an optimization phase, others launching in different geographic regions. Now, by the end of the year xgeeks has 19 people onboard, being one of the main drivers for head count growth, excellent results in customer satisfaction surveys, soon to have arguably the best office in Leiria, ending the year profitable and with high expectations of growth next year, as demand keeps growing and we’re being able to attract the right talent!
KI labs picking up the OKR’s framework
We started testing different ways of working with OKR’s. As we’re all about testing hypothesis really aiming to take value out of what we do or implement in the company, every quarter we had a different way to define them, since we really wanted to test what would work better for us.
In Q1 we first organized a team retreat to put everyone on the same page regarding the OKR framework. Since we’re still a small unstructured team, we just started with company level OKR’s with 2 objectives and key results set by me. There was also 1 objective and key results defined together with the team in a collaborative and structured process suggested by me. We tested collaborative and structured.
In Q2 the process was less collaborative on the definition and I was deciding alone the company level OKR’s. We tested structured non collaborative, note that although the definition was not collaborative, the execution was of course, a team effort.
In Q3 the process was similar to Q2. No test
In Q4 we tested how the team would react with no structure guidelines at all. We literally said to the whole team, take control! Here we tested collaborative and unstructured
We could go into details on the learnings we took from the different approaches, how the team reacted to the different methods, what worked better for us etc… but that’s a whole other article. I consider it an highlight because we were really able to get a lot of learnings from it and get the team to be OKR aware (to a certain extent, there’s still margin for improvement). We’re still not really there yet but looking forward, we’re better prepared to use something that’s really useful, not artificial and fitting to our organization.
First efforts to be driven by data
I’ve been through the pains that an organization faces when decisions aren’t made with data backing up. Having buy in to this mindset is just one part of the challenge. The second and also extremely complicated the later you start doing it, is to create the source of truth and data literacy, needed by everyone in your team to take profits from a data driven culture. Gladly, we started doing this sooner than later which makes everything easier. Having this in mind, a project called eagle eye was created aiming to enable every company in the group to be data driven.
“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” — Jim Barksdale
Eagle eye is not just an enabler for the company to be data driven. To analyze data and find the right answers and most importantly, the right questions we need to collect data. To collect data you need to have a process around it and typically, to have a process around it you need tools. Sometimes, those tools don’t exist or there’s no good fit available in the market. You see where I’m heading to? Eagle eye is also helping us find potential opportunities for tools that the market isn’t offering for businesses like ours.
I’m right now taking the benefits of it, since it’s so much easier to do a Pause/Rewind of 2019 with data accessible and reliable. We also found one interesting problem to solve and associated tool we can work internally for talent development, popping from the need to collect data! Having some time out of projects allow us to work on this efforts, trainings and R&D.
Product Design function finally lands in KI labs Lisbon
Looking at the focus of KI labs Lisbon, there was one key area that we were missing. In early stage ventures, discovery/exploration is key and for that we needed to level up our product design skills in the team. We were lucky to attract 2 senior product designers with experience in both startups and scale ups. The outcome was, of course, massive! Not just we were able to improve the UI/UX of the products we were creating together with our clients, we were also able to evangelize the importance of design and steer the process of product discovery in existing clients. Positioning KI labs Lisbon, closer to where we want to be and to how we believe customer centric companies should work.
We’re happy to start 2020 with interesting B2B products, about to be developed, that started with discovery steered by us without jumping ahead with unnecessary engineering.
People eXperience team is created to consolidate
This was for me, the most important event of 2019. Everyone was busy in projects, meaning everything internally was missing (processes and policies) and the team was getting to a considerable size already. I feel lucky that we were able to gather so many great, proactive individuals eager to keep running the bare minimal internal efforts. Since there was still few support, we were just some product, engineering and design people working in clients who were also taking care of the needed people operations of the company, like hiring and on boarding with little process. It worked to a certain extent thanks to the patience our team had to embrace chaos. Of course, patience isn’t unlimited and I needed to solve it as soon as possible. Fortunately, we were able to onboard Liliana Cardoso who created our PX (People eXperience) team to consolidate all processes & policies (or lack of) and improve the overall experience of the employees working with us, and employee happiness is for me, the most important thing to have covered.
The work of People eXperience team is key for the foundation that we need to grow further our companies, creating a proper lifecycle for our employees. Something we will also share later in more detail!
grow.inc spaces running in Lisbon
We invested a lot in office spaces that enhance the creativity and motivation of people to wake up and feel happy in their workplace. Since we value a lot the synergies that communities and the right networks can bring, we created a dedicated company focused in community building and office spaces called grow.inc spaces with 4 office spaces and a very cool rooftop. We’re ending the year with full occupancy, processes set, interesting companies by our side and awesome parties to remember in our rooftop.
xgeeks hires an Head of Engineering
With so many things going on, it was naturally getting super hard for me to follow up on everything. One key thing that needed to be fixed this year looking at the growth xgeeks had, was a technical leadership focused in creating an engineering organization that could enhance and develop our engineers further. This is crucial for retention and people happiness at work and most importantly for the vision of xgeeks. It’s of course an effort that needs a lot of time, dedication and energy. To fill the gap, we on boarded Luís Soares who has experience in tech senior management roles. He is now taking the lead working together with PX team in career development to make xgeeks the reference company for engineers to grow and specialize.
Personally, I feel this year was all about living on the edge, learning to live with the problems we accumulated and solving them at the right moment, not sooner not later. I feel I was doing too many things outside my main area of expertise (engineering & technology) with lack of focus. Usually, I take learnings out of every situation I’m in and I feel it was good to leave my main field, unfocus a bit to see the “outside world” and see how I could apply some processes and way of thinking, to other problems in different domains. I’m now better in accepting having things out of control, which I just didn’t accept before. By not accepting some things to be out of control you limit yourself and going through this experience also pushed me to be better in finding the right moment to tackle them.
I’m actually happy with how things turned out to be, sacrificing a year where I was less focused in tech and doing so many things at the same time, completely out of my area of expertise, because it actually fits the spirit of home of entrepreneurs, solvers and creators we have at KI group. This lack of focus turned out to be an excellent field for hypothesis experimentation and I see us ending 2019 with the right building blocks to refocus again next year and to tackle any challenge in venture building and engineering at scale.
- Are you passionate about finding problem/solution fit and product/market fit while ramping up companies? KI labs Lisbon says Hi!
- Are you looking for a company that supports you to be a specialist in an engineering topic while working in interesting and impactful projects? xgeeks says Hi!
- Do you want to be part of a community close to very talented people and lot’s of interesting events ? grow.inc spaces is here for you
Now… 2020 is right here and we need the best with us, will you press forward & play?
