Keith Lucas

It is much more about a principle that the organizational structure, who you have on the team, what they do, and how they're organized to work together.

That serves the mission, not the other way around.

And a lot of people will acknowledge, of course, that's the case.

But when you get out there and practice, there's an enormous amount of momentum that I've seen and experienced myself in the structure coming first and the mission having a dovetail into the structure.

It's the other way around.

The mission comes first.

So when doing any sort of thinking ahead and thinking about the team, I have a three-step process.

I think about first, where do we need to be in a certain amount of time, whether it's a week, a month, a year, where do we need to be?

You put a snake in the ground.

Then you back out what you need to do in order to get there.

And you can do this even in the face of uncertainty, but you can back out the rough guideposts of what you need to do to get there.

And then you organize the team around that, regardless of how it's organized today.

So let's take an example of a small, say, 10-person team, one-person team, and how there actually are natural cadences to do this kind of thing.

So there are mechanical cadences.

You wouldn't want to reorganize at the end of a two-week sprint across the entire team, but you might every two weeks shuffle the team around to allocate resources.

More broadly, you might organize the larger team after a quarter or after a multi-week push to accomplish a big goal or when you have a funding round happen or every year.

Then there's also an opportunistic signals or moments where you can reorganize.

It could be when you are experimenting to find product market fit and you have to try

Something for a month and then you have to try something else for a few weeks and something else for three months.

Those are moments where you might reorganize quickly to achieve, to seek product market fit.