Jack and Jenna discuss how startups can harness goal-setting to stimulate, scale, and sustain growth.
Insights from Jack
On Designing Modern Performance Management
- “We are trying to give companies the best tools to give employees feedback and set the goals they need to be successful. Lattice is about being continuous, flexible, and transparent for the way people work in the new world. Employees don’t work by scheduling their year plan on January first and then checking back a year later. The world has become so much more dynamic than that. People want to get feedback continuously. We are trying to create a new structure for performance management that doesn’t come with all of the baggage.”
- “It’s really important to do real customer development; Dig deep into how people are using your product and what’s actually going on. We ask customers: Why are you using Lattice? What are you hoping to get from this? What made you come here? What were you hoping to get out of it initially? What are you actually getting out of it?”
- “When a user says ‘I want this feature,’ don’t just build the feature. You can never ask why too many times. You have to keep going down the rabbit hole until you get to the root of the problem. When you aggregate everything you come at your product from a holistic perspective and can see which aspects people feel are lacking. The feedback that we get from customers aggressively dictates what we build.“
On Productivity & Management
- “Goals overlap with daily productivity and long-term employee development and performance. As the builders of Lattice, we have to understand that difference very deeply and tease it out. When is a goal a part of productivity? When is it part of employee development? When is it part of both and how do they overlap?”
On Setting Goals to Stay Grounded
- “How do you help your employees stay engaged and happy when they are now working for a company that looks very different than the one they joined? Communication is the best way to navigate the transition. Increasing alignment, goal-setting, and transparency becomes more important as you grow.“
- “As you scale, you give your jobs away to people who are better at them than you. It feels really good because you have one fewer job to do and then you can do everything better. You simultaneously get to level up the quality of your old job while you get to improve the ones you’re currently responsible for. Be happy to give away your legos. Life is the way you frame it in your head and how you decide to feel about your circumstances.“
On Growth Environments
- “There is a short list of things that make people happy. People who are happy at work are more engaged and ultimately more productive. It’s in everyone’s interests, not just for personal happiness but for business reasons, for people to be truly happy.”
- “Growth is the lifeblood of startups. It’s the one thing that can make any other problem go away. Until you are in an environment where you can see how powerful growth is as a mechanic of company success it’s hard to believe how many aspects it improves. Growth and progress are some of the fundamental drivers of human happiness.”
- “As your role grows, you learn something new at each phase, get better at it, and then as soon as you improve you tackle a bigger challenge. You keep stretching and uncovering where you need to improve. If Teespring never scaled, I would have never learned that I am capable of doing more.”
- “When you launch a startup your biggest learning is about yourself. Seeing how I react in the face of adversity, not letting it throw me off, and use challenges to get better has taught me a lot. No matter what you have at your disposal or any advantages you have, it doesn’t change the fact that you need to go from nothing to creating something that people actually want. Getting there is really hard.”
- “People are going to love what you do and some are going to hate it. You can’t be afraid when not everyone likes everything that you make. Being comfortable with yourself and what you are creating and not worrying whether people like it is so important. Know what matters to you and what doesn’t and remember the difference.”