Does Your Startup Feel Chaotic? Good.

Kate here. No one goes into a startup thinking that there won’t be some amount of chaos—myself included. Today we’re thrilled to publish a new piece about startup chaos by Jean Hsu, whose post about ask vs. guess culture hit number one on Hacker News. Jean is a vice president of engineering with whom I had the opportunity to work at Medium, where she was an early engineer. She’s been writing about startups for a decade and founded a coaching and leadership development company for engineering leaders. In this piece, she distinguishes between the good startup chaos—what she calls necessary chaos—and the bad—or unnecessary—and offers advice on how to reduce the latter.

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Startups are inherently chaotic. There are a lot of unknowns, and teams need to navigate uncertainty as startups grow. New data might require you to re-order your roadmap, or you may fail several times as you experiment to find product-market fit. Sometimes, you’ll need to pivot your product to respond to a change in the market. In more extreme cases, you’ll need to pivot your entire company strategy.

Some of this chaos is good. It leaves room for creativity, gives team members more agency, and keeps your organization flexible. I call this necessary chaos. 

What doesn’t work is unnecessary chaos, borne by a lack of planning. Unnecessary chaos eats into any bandwidth for necessary chaos, which is the lifeblood of startups.

To be clear, no startup is completely without unnecessary chaos, and the gray area between unnecessary and necessary chaos is wide. However, in my experience as a vice president of engineering at several early-stage startups, I know firsthand the importance of not giving in completely to unnecessary chaos.

In this piece, I lay out methods for startups to identify unnecessary chaos, learn how to manage and reduce it, and make room to take on necessary chaos.