[See the first post in this series and an explanation about where these notes come from]

Notes on Culture & Personnel for Going Fast in start ups:

Get cultural DNA for speed. Make sure the people in your company want to go fast and know how to go fast.  Make it a major part of your interview process and visible culture.  Web 2.0 folks generally get it, but others don’t and they need to be cycled out.  Can you pair fast people with not-fast people and teach the not-fast people how to go fast?  No.  You can’t.  In short, get the right people.

Every engineer ships production code their first day at work. As part of building up the cultural DNA about quickly writing code and pushing it out for users to use,  you should set it up so every engineer writes and pushes live some code to the production servers on their first day of work.  If the site breaks in some way, shame on you for not having it set up avoid that.

Make shipping a fetish.  Make shipping product fast to the right customer the obsession.

Fast is not sloppy. Make sure your team knows the difference.

The best thing to do is the easiest thing to do. But do it right.  That’s speed.

Don’t own the product, own the goal. At Google, teams choose a goal to own, not a feature to own, or even a product to own.  What product solution ends up achieving a goal evolves much more in a business than the goal itself, so the goal is the better target, and gives the team more opportunity for creativity and speed.

Make decisions. Make sure you’re making decisions, not pseudo-decisions or delaying decisions.  Commit to it as a team, and have the team demand it from management.

Ship Fair or Good. Don’t ship Poor, but don’t ship Very Good or Excellent.  And when the Fair-Good is shipped, management is not allowed to send an email out noting the bugs or criticizing it. Get your team to embrace “Good Enough.”  I [heart] good enough. “That which is worth doing is worth doing poorly.”