operations in tech companies Archives

Starting a Tech Company for Non-Tech Co-Founders

October 26, 2019December 27, 2019
by Luis Gomes de Abreu

In 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote “Software is Eating the World” a think piece detailing how companies are increasingly software driven. Today, that statement is more true than ever before. Millions of businesses launch every year and they are more likely to be tech companies than at any other time in history.

While a “tech” company might use software to drive physical production and services, sell software as a service, or fit software solutions into any of a variety of other “flavors”, they are tech driven. This is true for giants ranging from Amazon to Google to Facebook. But, while tech companies are now becoming the norm, many founders and co-founders have no real idea that they are in or are building a tech company. While that might be intimidating or might push many entrepreneurs into waiting to launch their business, it’s also increasingly a norm.

Most Tech Companies Aren’t Started by Tech People

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com graduated with degrees in engineering and computer science. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, graduated with a degree in English. Airbnb was founded by two designers. The founder of Group and the founder of Pandora both have backgrounds in music. And, the founder of NerdWallet started the $500 million company after being laid off as a financial analyst. Millions of co-founders start tech companies, with no real idea of what a tech company is. But, that’s also the norm for many organizations, who are driven by people who excel at creating solutions, not at running or designing companies. In fact, 33% of S&P 500 CEOs graduate in engineering and 11% in business administration.

Running a Tech Company Requires a Shift in Mindset

Most non-tech co-founders launch a company and approach it from the perspective of a product. Your organization works to develop a minimum viable product and then bring it to market and focus on making sales. Tech companies don’t work this way. Instead, you have to treat development as an ongoing process. All business structure and operations have to be driven by long-term develop and continuous improvement.

It also changes how organizations operate, with operations, finance, customer service, sales, and HR very heavily tied into the same processes and value streams.

Making it Work

Your role in your organization will heavily depend on how many co-founders you have and what their roles are. If you’re going at it alone, it makes a lot of sense to partner with a technical person who can help bring your vision to life. If you already have a technical co-founder or don’t want one, your priorities should be building operational structure, hiring on technical people, and creating the foundations that will allow developers to build your product around that vision. In the early stages of a startup, your role has to be about getting people on board, pitching your product and vision, and creating a brand that sells your product. This will eventually include networking, pitching your product to funding, and possibly taking on a role like COO or CEO. While this will heavily depend on your organization, your role as a non-tech co-founder will be to ensure you understand how tech companies work, to support the structure enabling continuous growth, and to help the organization grow through bringing on skilled people, marketing, and earning funds.

Vision to Value is a deep dive into high-level operational structure for tech companies. With information on how to structure tech companies for continuous development and value delivery, Vision to Value is designed to help you build the foundations of a tech company.

Learn more about Vision to Value

Vision to Value

What is the Tech COO Role?

October 4, 2019December 27, 2019
by Luis Gomes de Abreu

The Chief Operating Officer or COO role is one as much defined by ambiguity as a list of tasks and role responsibilities. As a result, many tech startups wait to implement the role or simply avoid having it, often until far too-late in the game. And, ambiguity is understandable. While it’s easy to define what a chief marketing officer is responsible for or a chief technology officer, defining “Operations” is nowhere near so simple. The Tech COO and her role are defined by the organization, their relationship with the CEO, and the size of the organization.

This is especially crucial in tech organizations, where the role of a COO likely merges business operations (strategy, business growth, etc.) with tech operations.

A Partner for the CEO

The CEO is in charge of creating and directing vision and strategy. The COO should be her partner, directly working to act on and realize that vision and strategy. If the CEO is “what” the COO is “how”.

In many ways, this means that the ideal COO for your organization is one whose skills and personality complement that of the CEO. So, if the CEO has ideas but no practical way to scale them, the COO would step in to scale. Or, if the CEO has experience with operations, the COO might operate as a business partner, sharing work and ideas in an early startup.

What does the COO do in Tech Organizations?

The COO role is responsible for creating operations and structure supporting the day-to-day delivery of your organization’s products and services. That typically means architecture, business processes, product development, support, team structure, etc. Tech organizations, operations enable the sustainable creation and development of a software product, meaning that operations is about structure, people management, customer support, product development, product management, and support. Here, it’s crucial that organizations see the entire organization as a product, which the COO must oversee.

A tech COO is a strategist, an executor, and, to an extent, a jack of all trades. He should expect to take charge of operations and delivery, to work in interconnected roles with finance, sales, account management, marketing, PR, HR, and IT, and to realize the CEOs vision and strategy. In startups, the COO will often fill numerous roles, especially that of CTO, but this will heavily depend on the organization.

Operations is an important tool for any startup. It provides the structure to deliver software in a timely manner and to a consistent standard of quality, even as you scale. It enables organizations to grow and develop new ideas and services.

The Vision to Value Framework describes operations from a technical perspective, helping COOs design operations around the needs of their organization and its software product. With a high-level view of operations in tech companies, Vision to Value works to help COOs create and maintain a structure to support scaling tech organizations.

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Vision to Value

What is Operations in Tech Companies?

September 11, 2019December 26, 2019
by Luis Gomes de Abreu

Today’s businesses are increasingly tech-oriented, selling not manufactured goods and products, but rather services and downloadable products through online platforms and apps. This shift in how goods are distributed is a natural one, as consumers increasingly seek out digital services, solutions, and information. It also necessitates a fundamental shift in how organizations approach tech operations.

At its most basic level, operations are defined as the framework designed to keep the company running and earning money. However, this framework and its pieces look significantly different in tech companies than in something more traditional, like a manufacturing plant. Understanding those differences can help you to build better tech operations, capable of supporting scaling organizations.

What’s Included in Tech Operations?

Tech operations are quite simply the framework (typically communication) behind running an organization. For most organizations, this includes support functions, value chain, and strategy. The specifics might vary from company to company but should likely be outlined in your business plan.

Systems – Systems include processes, communication channels, networks, and other means of connection. These can be as simple as establishing work processes, creating portals, creating knowledge bases, and so on but can be as complex as aligning overlapping departments, coordinating finance, HR, and customer service, documenting work, or managing external relationships.

People – People are the core of any tech company. The more software-oriented your company, the more people become your most valuable resource. People must be organized, given structure to work well, hired to meet strategy and goals, and trained to continue to meet the goals of the organization. Operations tackles questions like “who should be hired”, “how should people work”, “where should people work”, and even “what is work”.

Technology – Operations covers hardware and software tooling, helping to choose the items that facilitate work. This might include software tooling, it might include automation, and it might include items such as integrating work processes into tools and software.

Tech operations very much focuses on people and helping people to perform work. This isn’t always the case in other types of organizations. For example, manufacturing tends to focus more on product, product development, and transit.

Operations exist to enable businesses to function in a way that drives value for the customer and for the business. This means that operations are functions designed to allow businesses to perform work as usual, to optimize that work, to increase the value delivered to consumers, and to excel. Formal operations offer limited value in the very early stages of an organization, but become increasingly valuable and necessary as your organization grows. Establishing operates at an early stage means you’ll have the foundations to scale effectively and sustainably, because you have the framework in place to do so.

The Vision to Value Framework is one solution to implementing structure at this stage, because it approaches operations from the perspective of development and enabling people and technology. Paying attention to how software is developed, ongoing maintenance, and creating work processes capable of supporting innovation and rapid development is crucial. Vision to Value uses 5 pillars to support these operations; Vision and Strategic Plan, Work Management, Process Management, People and structure, and Data and Information Management.

This outlines a framework designed to support tech organizations as they scale, with the goal of creating a sustainable organization capable of delivering value to customers over the long-term,

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