ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT At the beginning of any company, everyone is doing whatever it takes to succeed. When you enter growth, that no longer works. People need to be connected linearly to success metrics. Critical to choosing the right structure is creating ways you will change and evolve it. You want to anticipate that the size and shape and number of people around any given table is bound to change. “It’s a good habit to check in every six months to blow up meetings that have gotten entrenched, stale, or no longer productive,” says Johnson. “You don’t want to get attached to thinking that a certain process is the only way to do something, or that you need a certain combination of people to get something done — I can pretty much guarantee that neither the process or the people will still be right a year from now.” 3. Who has been successful at our company so far? Maybe you’ve hired 20 people or just 10 — that’s still enough to pattern match what kind of person is good at working for your company. “Take the time to ask: Okay, what kind of people have we hired? Are they a diverse enough group to bring different perspectives and experience to the company? Who’s doing really well? Who’s scaling at the same pace as the company? What are those people’s characteristics?” says Johnson. In fact, making a list of their attributes is a good way to either deifne, reinforce or tweak your operating principles to make sure they’re aligned. The people who scale with your company are the ones who anticipate what they need to learn now in order to excel at what their role will become in six months. They’re curious enough to look ahead. They aren’t content with or consumed by simply doing their present job. When Johnson ifrst joined, Stripe’s international coverage was new. There were individual country managers working as generalists to get the ball rolling wherever they were stationed. But as the company grew, these people needed to transition into serious team builders — a few of them eventually running large organizations of their own. Some of these country managers scaled into these new roles. Others didn’t because they couldn’t gain the skills they needed to build and manage growing teams while producing results. As the company brought on new country managers for further expansion, they hired candidates based on pattern matching with the type of people who had already been successful in this role. By and large, these were employees who 69