Onboarding Blocks — How to think of and structure an onboarding process

Onboarding Blocks — How to think of and structure an onboarding process

Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash

Properly onboarding new team members not only increases morale in new hires and increases team fit, but also yields better productivity in the team more quickly than an unstructured process.

Careful planning and thought, as well as company size- and stage-tailored methods, are prerequisites, and adaptation and constant evolution in concurrence with the hiring speed and the organization’s over-time structural changes should also be front of mind. Lastly, you need to differentiate between two main types of onboarding: 1) onboarding into your company and 2) onboarding into a team within your company.

To help illustrate how to think about onboarding, I’ve broken the process of building an onboarding workflow down into several blocks: which provide the creative freedom to come up with and evolve an onboarding plan that works for your company. I like to think of them as ‘blocks’ — similar to lego blocks — because broken out as such gives you flexibility on how to deliver and evolve them. How you execute and layer these blocks largely comes down to your company’s culture and the time availability of people that are of significance for the onboarding experience you want to deliver. For example, on this latter point, it is famously shared that Jack Dorsey (co-founder of Twitter and Square) used to personally onboard new employees with a walk where he would share his thoughts on the company’s vision and values, could someone else have done this as effectively? It’s up to you to judge for your own org, hire, and circumstances.

The blocks I highlight below are a mix of operational and cultural elements, they can be intermingled, layered, or done in whichever order you desire, but naturally some make more sense before others (unless you have a reason to do so). Also, you (the founder or leader) don’t have to be the sole architect of these blocks; other colleagues can be the authors of these blocks as well, shaping them as they see fit of the sub-cultures that might exist within their functions or divisions (e.g. tech teams tend to have their own sub cultures). Ensure, however, that any sub-culture still adheres to the values of your organisation — you don’t want to be encouraging factions!

Below are the ‘post offer’ onboarding blocks (once you’ve already thought through and delivered the offer or contract verbally or over more formal communication, and the candidate has accepted it) and their descriptions. Try to think of the list below as building blocks in a process you and your colleagues can create and make into a repeatable process (if more than one hire), specific to the role and circumstance of the new hire rather than a prescriptive sequence.

The technical/asset onboarding block — A seemingly simple, but important one, where you provide the new hire with anything as small as their new ‘badge’ to something more substantial like their new computer, login passwords, access to the intranet, etc. This block can be separate from the onboarding of HR-related matters (i.e. policies) as I will highlight later below. This block can feel very disorienting to a new hire who might have had different tech tools and processes in their previous role, so give it the right time and patience. It will likely vary if the hire is remote vs. in person, so you should think about unique experiences therein. It’s not necessarily the first block you should do if, for example, you want to highlight key risk factors of working in your organisation first (e.g. safety or regulatory requirements).

The cultural/values onboarding block — This is one where leadership (of some sort, be it divisional or higher up) takes the time to walk through what it is like to work with others in the organisation, what might be expected of them to get along with others, walk through the values, the bigger picture and vision, etc. This doesn’t have to be a 1:1 and it can involve multiple leaders if relevant, but the objective is to have the new hire understand the ‘tribal norms’ of your organisation and how they play a part in its success. As part of this chat, you should highlight any meetings or traditions you’d expect them to take part in and their regularity so that they can appreciate their importance.

The colleague onboarding block — Less about explaining the culture and more about showing the culture, this starts with how you introduce the new hire to the rest of the organisation (e.g. via email or otherwise at point of hire), and continues through where the new hire meets your broader set of colleagues over a welcome beer, dinner, lunch, etc. (whatever your thing is). This block is helpful so people don’t feel like a stranger or ‘new person’ forever, and so that a broader group of people know who the new hire is and what they will do. This can be done for a group of new hires, but you should try and keep that group to a small enough size that the broader colleagues can still spend some 1:1 time with each during the welcome.

As part of this block, you can also assign the new hire with a ‘buddy’ that helps them along the way. Pick who will be that buddy carefully, though, as it will require the buddy to dedicate time to the buddy role and properly consider the new hire’s status and/or needs so they don’t feel neglected. If that buddy is regularly absent or doesn’t deliver on expectations when the new hire needs assistance, the whole buddy thing can backfire. In other words, a dysfunctional buddy system is worse than no buddy expectations at all!

The roles and responsibility block — This one is where their direct manager or higher up walks through the org chart, where they sit in the org, who they need to report to whom, and what they will be directly responsible for. Ideally, you make it very clear what success looks like for the new hire and how that affects the org as a whole. You can add, if relevant, a description of how the organization works (eg. how your company makes money and contributes to the larger economy) if the employee may not fully understand how the industry functions (which can be normal for some roles in highly complex industries).

To highlight when this works well, my colleague Gus Curley adds: One legend that emphasizes this point is “during a tour of NASA headquarters in 1961, John F. Kennedy encountered a janitor mopping the floors. “Why are you working so late?” Kennedy asked. “Mr President,” the janitor responded, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.” My analysis is that the Janitor understood how his role contributed to the success of the company. Without the janitor understanding how the engineers work (in that they need a clean workspace to not contaminate their tests which ultimately could put the mission in jeopardy) he might not have cared so much about his own job.

As this anecdote highlights, at the end of walking a colleague through this block, it should be very clear to them what success looks like not only for them, but their team, their managers, and the org as a whole.

Lastly, this block should include a series of expectations for the new hire in terms of where they need to be contributing by certain time points after hire (your choice depending on probation periods as well as how long the training takes for them to be productive, but think of timeframes that make sense (e.g. less than a year)). As part of this you can introduce how the review process will work for your new hire, and how they can also add to your organisation by sharing their feedback on any matter (assuming you have a feedback loop within your org).

The HR policies and benefits block — This block usually generates quite a few questions, even if many were covered as part of the hiring process. It includes things like explaining the ‘work from home’ policy, the holiday policy, the pay scales for the future, etc. It also includes any regulatory and training requirements the employee will need to be able to do the job. So it is worthwhile thinking about when and how to cover these in a way that makes sense in the flow of ‘lego bricks’ above. Too soon, and you can come across as a very policy-driven organization, too late, and questions that might be important to the new hire to plan for their personal needs will be addressed too long after joining your organisation.

Armed with the above blocks, you can build a custom workflow for onboarding based on the needs of your organization. You can also lean in on your company’s leadership to innovate ways on how to customize these blocks; that’s why it is useful to break them out like this, because as the leader, you might want to take some of them on personally, and others, you might see better to delegate.

In the end, there is one simple rule when it comes to onboarding, after you are done with it, does the new hire feel welcome and appreciated, and have clarity on how they can help everyone and themselves succeed. If you’ve achieved that, kudos, you’ve done it well.

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A note on onboarding tools: Alex Lewis, my colleague and Talent Manager within Seedcamp, has also been researching the topic and seen how other companies implement these blocks using widely available tools and resources. In his words:

The blocks above touch on a number of subject areas within People Operations outside of onboarding, such as employee engagement and performance management. Building out your “People tech stack” can help with automating these steps and save you time at scale, manage and house your processes and encourage communication and collaboration across the company. For example, culture and values come across not only in your interactions with employees in person or via internal comms tools like Slack, but also should be documented for easy access by your team members, building an internal wiki using Notion is a popular and easy to scale tool, utilised across much of the ecosystem. Onboarding colleagues and arranging for technical procurement can involve multiple team members coordinating and can be difficult to manage when your time is thin, or you don’t have a dedicated People person. Tools like Donut can automate this process, and send reminders to relevant team members via Slack. Having an HRIS (Human Resources Information System), such as CharlieHR, can be a one stop shop for new employees to access HR policies and internal reviews to keep check on their progress and responsibilities, whilst platforms like Ben can house all of your benefits in one place too.

However, it is important to remember that tools do not replace the importance of one on one interaction, consistency of communication is paramount. Train your team members involved in onboarding to the highest standard possible, ensuring your new employees are continuously receiving the best experience possible with little ambiguity, so they are being set up for success from day zero.

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Have the Tough Chats (even if you don’t want to)

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Over the past 6 months, I’ve witnessed several founder relationships and several inter-company relationships fall apart for one reason: delaying a possibly adversarial conversation that needed to happen. Had these conversations happened in a structured and well thought out way, I’m convinced that the universe of options available would have been much broader than those that came to be when things were too late and too inflamed.

I hate interpersonal conflict as much as I suspect most of you do. The idea that talking through a problem can quickly escalate into a full-blown conflict always daunts me, and in some cases even has paralysed me in the past.

Most well-adjusted people in a startup just want to get along with their colleagues (many of which feel like family), but I’ve experienced the hard way that failing to address an issue early on can have disastrous consequences later. That’s why I learned to have tough chats to address unresolved/underlying tensions that would otherwise result in a much larger conflict down the road.

Tensions exist in any group, whether you like it or not, and particularly in high-growth environments like startups, tensions are a natural part of evolving quickly. Speed of execution & hiring vs. cost management, seniority of external hire vs. promotion from within — are part of these daily trade-offs. If balanced well, these tensions drive growth. But too many unaddressed tensions over time can lead to a company’s downfall. Founders fighting about the business trajectory and unable to resolve underlying tensions is a classic example of how companies are torn apart from within.

So tensions are, in essence, both good and bad. But why do they often end up in a ‘cataclysmic event’? They get out of hand when you repeatedly avoid having the tough chats.

I define ‘tough chats’ as well-prepared/structured conversations with a constructive end in mind, with an openness to hear the other person out and find ways of reconciling differences to move past obstacles. Tough chats are NOT impulsive; they are NOT knee-jerk chats letting someone know how you feel in ‘that instant.’ They include emotions but are not ruled by them.

The ‘toughest’ part in tough chats, I believe, is in that they require effort on your part for them to go well. They are extra tough because you can’t expect the other person to do any of the work in advance (even though you hope they do). There is no way around it. You have to put in effort and preparation for them to be constructive. They require time, energy, and empathy to understand your colleague’s perspective before you approach them and reflect on how you’d like to react to their opposition.

Additionally, you need to decouple your ego from the outcome, see the bigger picture outside of your ‘victory,’ and visualise a positive/constructive result, even if you don’t get your way. Lastly, take the time to outline the essential topics you want to cover to find a resolution to your problems. You can’t get rid of tensions, but you can move aim to move past individual ones and to find a common ground / solutions to the issues.

The more you get into the habit of having tough chats at the individual or organisational level, the more likely you are to transform conflict avoidance into constructive problem solving and personal/business growth… and… the more you will likely avoid the very thing we all fear the most: a tougher chat down the road.

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Why you need to continuously invest in yourself if you want to lead others.

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There are many great books and courses on leadership, self-development, managing small teams, but they all revolve around one key point of evolution: You.

For any progress you expect your organisation or division to make, it begins with you. You have to be willing to change. You have to be willing to evolve. You have to be willing to improve. You have to be willing to reconsider what you thought to be true in light of the changing context you live in, and you have to be willing to learn from those around you.

This isn’t easy. Stagnation is tempting, change is hard.

The reason why it isn’t easy is because, if you are reading this, you are likely a self-starter. To usually start something, a company or product, means you have to put things into motion. YOU have to take actions, YOU have to create processes, systems, products, conversations, and relationships. After many months or years of driving things, this motivation to be the main source of all creation within your organisation/division can become a habit even after that habit is no longer absolutely necessary.

Once your organisation/division starts to grow, if you’ve hired well and created a culture that allows it, your colleagues will be equally capable (if not more) in driving creativity and leadership from within your organisation. This team-driven creativity can include everything from what to do, to how to do it. Your job evolves into creating room to let this flourish. In other words, your creativity evolves into the enablement of creation.

In order to do this effectively though, you need to continue to invest in yourself, it doesn’t just happen on its own. I define ‘investing in yourself’ as a combination of learning from others but equally importantly, taking time to reflect on your actions/reactions on a daily basis. You need to invest in yourself so that you can learn how to balance between when to get involved and when not to. You need to continuously learn on how to catch trends that can become toxic within a division or organisation and know how to manage them so they resolve themselves positively. You need to invest in learning how to communicate more effectively to those within your organisation (above and below you) but also to those outside your organisation; not only to attract more talent, but also to effectively deal with ambiguous circumstances that inevitably arise in any organisation.

Additionally, building a company and hiring people to help you with scaling it requires you to take ownership and stewardship over not only the outcome of the company, but also over the people that make it possible. You can’t do that if you have your head so far up your ass you can’t be challenged by those around you or can’t be approached out of fear of not being listened to, or worse, scolded or ridiculed. We all have feelings, this doesn’t mean you should feel nothing when someone reaches out to you with feedback, but rather your tendency should not be around how you are right, but rather more towards: ‘what can I learn’ from this to help us all improve and be better off?

As I write this, I’m very conscious of where I am on my own personal journey on this topic. I’ve made many mistakes along the way, and likely will make many more. However, I remind myself that yesterday’s failures aren’t an excuse for inaction today, rather they give me a richer context from which to learn.

To share a personal example, for the longest time, we kept many of our organisation-wide decisions centred around the most senior team members, perhaps due to the fear of change or fear of what the output might be. This however, created workflow bottlenecks and stifled ideas from colleagues (rather than creating an idea-discussing context). It was basically a mode of operating that didn’t give freedom to different heads of departments to really think about how to build their respective products for their respective teams and customers. After some tough chats with colleagues where we identified the root cause of the issue, a new org structure was put in place that granted much more freedom to division heads (but with the requisite accountability) to identify key issues, assess their severity, prioritise by impact, and create new products and execute initiatives. This conversion took some getting used to, and some people letting go of some things, but in the end, the outcome has so far been much better than the previous status quo.

As you embark on your own development, if you’d like some resources to start with, here are a few I’ve found helpful in my journey so far:

The Great CEO Within— A very practical guide to all aspects of company building. A must read.

The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership — A great book that helps you reflect on ‘habits’ you might or might not be engaging in within your organisation or division, and how by changing them you might be able to change your culture and outcomes.

Extreme Ownership — A good reminder that you can’t have change if no one takes ownership of what’s happened.

Commit Action— Not a book, but rather an accountability program that operates on a weekly cadence after you’ve reflected on the goals you have for yourself.

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Hiring your First Product Leader

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Blog post written by Seedcamp Venture Partner, Andy Budd, with support from Carlos Espinal, and edited by several guest editors.

Tech founders generally start a company because they have a vision for a new product; a product that will solve some meaningful problem at scale. They’ll set that vision, assemble a team of makers, and help bring that product to life. As such, the founder is almost always the company’s first product leader.

Knowing When to Replace Yourself

In the early stages of a start-up’s life, founders tend to be heavily product focussed. They’ll spend their time exploring user needs, coming up with usage hypotheses, figuring out what features to build next, and testing them out of the market. As a product person myself, it’s a super fun stage, so it’s not surprising that founders want to be driving product decisions for as long as possible.

However being a good CEO involves more than just building a great product. It’s about building a great company around that product. So as the company grows, founders will find themselves having less and less time to devote to product decisions. Instead they find themselves doing a tonne of other things like raising money, hiring teams, setting culture, putting new processes in place, finding customers, cutting deals, and a whole host of other things.

Sometimes this shift in focus can happen quickly. Especially if the company gets early traction or after a large fundraise which necessitates an explosion in hiring. However I often see founders feeling a little reluctant stepping out of this role. While this is totally understandable — the product is their baby after all — founders can quickly become a delivery bottle-neck. When this happens, it’s often time to hire your first product leader.

The Typical First Hire

Often that first product hire is administrative in nature. The CEO still holds the vision and makes most of the decisions. They just need somebody to help deliver that vision. As such, founders are often looking for somebody who can gather requirements (what the founder wants to build), organize workstreams (who’s going to do the work, how are they going to do it, and by when), structure and communicate priorities (creating backlogs, writing user stories, running meetings and feeding back progress), and ensuring the work gets delivered in time and to the right quality (which generally involves a lot of coordination).

There’s a surprising amount of inter-team coordination and document wrangling needed to manage a modern product workflow, and it doesn’t make sense for the founder to do this work. In the “olden days” this would probably have been done by a project manager. In the modern tech world, that first hire is more likely to be a “product manager”.

Trusting your hires

When you look at the characteristics of a good product manager, they tend to be fairly systematic and process oriented. They want to talk to customers to understand what they think. They want to analyze the usage data to understand how customers are actually using the product and whether what they’ve built is working. They want to build up a picture of market trends, come up with their own hypotheses and test them out in the market. They also want to involve other stakeholders like engineering, design, sales and marketing, knowing that those teams will also want input into the road map.

For a busy founder with a strong product vision, all this new process can feel overkill. So there’s a tendency for founders to tell early product managers what they want them to build. However good product managers want to be more than just order takers. Instead they want to be involved in driving — or at the very least informing — the product vision. As such, hiring your first product leader often requires founders to give up a certain degree of control. Something which may not come naturally and may feel both uncomfortable and inefficient.

Letting go of Ownership

If you’ve hired a good product manager and the company is growing at a comfortable rate, founders are often happy to cede control of day-to-day product decisions as it means they can work on the business rather than in the business. Especially areas like partnership deals, fun-raising and customer acquisition. This doesn’t mean they give up owning the product vision, but it does usually mean that they give more control over how that vision is implemented.

Ideally this means giving the product team specific targets (through OKRS or KPI) or areas of focus (through a North Star Framework), rather than telling them what to build next. It also means having product partners who exude a sense of confidence and keep everybody up-to-date with progress, so you’re not constantly chasing folks for updates. So for this new relationship to work there needs to be a high degree of trust.

Where Early Hires go Wrong

Unfortunately the first product hire can easily become a source of tension for the founder and CEO, as they negotiate new boundaries and have a polite quarrel for control. This is especially true if the founder is still driving the vision and wants to be involved in all the details, but lacks the necessary bandwidth.

I often see big culture clashes between founders and product leaders. Founders often have a strong gut feel for what they think is the right approach, and may see research and experimentation and an unnecessary hindrance. By comparison, good product managers have been taught that in order to do a good job they need access to the customer and the ability to run experiments and learn.

As a result you often end up with founders feeling frustrated that their new product partners are bringing in too much process, slowing down or questioning the roadmap (when from the CEOs perspective they feel it’s obvious what needs to happen) and trying to wrest away some of their vision, or worse, drive the product in a different direction. At the same time the new product manager will very likely feel as though they aren’t being given the space to do a good job, or having to manage too many competing inputs, with little actual ownership.

How to avoid the deadlock

Early product hires often lack the political heft to push back on founder expectations, and can find themselves in a really challenging position. In fact I believe product management is one of the hardest jobs in tech as they generally find themselves having to satisfy a bunch of different constituents (founders, sales & marketing, customer, designers & engineer) without having the authority or power to mandate compromise. As such I often see early product managers burn out, and get replaced by more senior execs.

To avoid this drama, you sometimes see other members of the founding team step into the product leadership role instead. Sometimes this will be the CTO/technical co-founder. This is especially true if it’s a very tech heavy product. Other times the lead designer will step up and start owning both design and product.This works especially well if there’s a lot of “interface” to the product.

One of the good things about having co-founders take on the product leadership role is they’re likely to share the CEOs vision, and have built up enough trust to be given the space to execute. However designers and CTOs don’t typically have the operational or administrative experience to execute the role particularly well, so will often bring in a junior product manager to support the operational side of things (ticket writing, backlog management, comms etc) pretty quickly.

Product is a Key Hire

For all of the above reasons, finding the right product leader is super hard. You’re looking for somebody who can work closely and collaboratively with the founders, often having very robust and opinionated discussion, while doing so in a way that doesn’t threaten or undermine the founders vision or sense of control. As such you may find yourself going through several product leaders before you find the right fit, and it’s often as much about the founders own personal learning journey as it is the skills and talent of the product manager.

If you’re going through this process of hiring your first product manager, don’t hesitate to reach out to Andy and he’d love to help. Here are more resources from his website: https://www.andybudd.com/

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When is the right time to hire a CMO?

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With growth being such an important metric for a company post-fundraise, it is of no surprise that one of the very first questions that arises after raising money is how to spend it, both in terms of people but also in customer acquisition.

As most small companies have the founding team acting as the marketing, sales, and product development team, it can be quite tricky to ‘scale’ across any one of those functions. However, the wisdom of having founders’ lead these three things until finding product-market fit is one I believe in and also recommend, mostly because it allows the founding team to be nimble in adapting their marketing strategy, the sales strategy, and the product to match the needs of the customers as per conversations they are having with the customer directly (vs. via an intermediary, who is typically newly hired and desperate to showcase worth, even if not entirely aligned with the company’s PMF context).

In an effort to unpack each of these, we will do a mini-deep dive into these three parts and cover the key things to consider as part of how to best use your newly raised funds.

Starting with Marketing, I sat down with my colleague Natasha Lytton, who is an experienced CMO, Head’s up Seedcamp’s Marketing in addition to leading our Platform. I asked her the typical questions I see asked (or those that sometimes people are too embarrassed to ask) around Marketing.

What is the most misunderstood part of ‘the marketing function’ within a startup?

  1. That growth belongs exclusively within the marketing department
  2. That one person can cover the whole stack of ‘marketing’ — ie performance and brand
  3. That short-term tactics are the wholly grail and that customer acquisition costs (CAC) you achieve today will last forever

When you should be doing marketing vs. someone else?

It really depends on you; your skillset, where you feel most comfortable and what’s going to be the most impactful use of your time. If you have zero marketing experience and know this is going to be a core function in order for your business to grow, I’d be looking to bring someone on to run it asap. I think, as founders, it’s essential you take an active interest in the story of the business, which is essential when it comes to shaping your narrative. Early-stage companies are driven pretty exclusively by the founder so, while you may not necessarily be buying Facebook ads or creating content to help drive SEO, you should be inputting on the story behind the business, defining what sort of legacy you want to leave in the world and thinking about how best to bring that to life.

What should be your first hire, a junior person or a senior person?

I’ve personally always been a fan of hiring people who can grow into roles. However, I think with the market we’re currently in, that’s changing a lot. You used to hire people with relatively little experience (maybe 4–5 years) but who had loads of energy, intellectual curiosity and passion to contribute and learn and grow alongside the business, In the current market, with everyone raising so much more money and expected to grow 100x faster than before, the need for people who’ve ‘been there and done that’ tends to dominate. I’d always be asking:

Will this be a challenge that this person will be ‘excited to do?’ as that will likely determine how willing they are to stick around. I’ve found senior people are more likely to take on roles in very early companies if it’s a different sector/experience for them whereas companies always tend to want to hire people who’ve churned out from competitor businesses, Here I’d add, it’s not essential that someone has direct experience in the sector you’re in for them to be valuable.

Is this person a ‘doer’ and someone who is willing to get their hands dirty

Is this person — be it senior or more junior — someone you feel you’d be able to trust and who can help take you on a journey

As one many a founder starts wondering if the solution to their marketing problem stems from simply hiring a senior marketing person, let’s move on to the core question:

What is a CMO?

Someone who leads the entire marketing function of the organisation. This is the person who should be updating the founder on what marketing is delivering, setting the marketing strategy, working with the CFO to define budgets and reporting (as and when necessary) to key stakeholders — ie investors — on impact.

When should you hire a CMO?

Really depends on the stage of your business. If you’re hiring a CMO and it’s a marketing team of one, you’re not really hiring a CMO. I think a lot of this comes down to titles and how this sits within your organisation as a whole. People are increasingly less willing to give out C level titles pre-Series A (which I think is right). A ‘proper’ CMO should signify someone who is going to come in and own a substantial budget and run a decent sized team. I’d also be looking at bringing someone on when you have significant marketing targets you need the business to hit to help you achieve your core goals.

How should you judge a CMO?

CMOs are one of the quickest roles to churn out as everyone wants to grow, and they want to do it tomorrow. I think a lot of this comes down to setting clear expectations right at the start. With early-stage businesses, a lot will be unknown and so while goals are important, the requirements of the organisation and the individuals within them to flex as the company likely will is also important.

I would personally judge a CMO by:

  • Leadership quality
  • Founder trust and relationship
  • Ability to quickly course correct if something isn’t working
  • Ability to create a balance of short and long term strategies and tactics to drive growth while future proofing the brand in the long run

What kind of budget should you discuss with your CMO?

Traditional rule of thumb in consumer marketing is 10% of funding should be spent on marketing. This should then come down as the company scales and as next rounds get bigger.

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask about marketing hiring and creating a marketing function after having recently raised? Feel to ask those questions in the comments section below!

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