The Builder's Guide to the Tech Galaxy

Learn to scale your startup with a roadmap to the all-important part of the business lifecycle between launch and IPO

In The Builder’s Guide to the Tech Galaxy: 99 Practices to Scale Startups into Unicorn Companies, a team of accomplished investors, entrepreneurs, and marketers deliver a practical collection of concrete strategies for scaling a small startup into a lean and formidable tech competitor. By focusing on the four key building blocks of a successful company – alignment, team, functional excellence, and capital—this book distills the wisdom found in countless books, podcasts, and the authors’ own extensive experience into a compact and accessible blueprint for success and growth.

In the book, you’ll find:

• Organizational charts, sample objectives and key results (OKRs), as well as guidance for divisions including technology and product management, marketing, sales, people, and service operations
• Tools and benchmarks for strategically aligning your company’s divisions with one another, and with your organization’s “North Star”
• Templates and tips to attract and retain a triple-A team with the right scale-up mindset
• Checklists to help you attract growth capital and negotiate term sheets

Perfect for companies with two, ten, or one hundred employees, The Builder’s Guide to the Tech Galaxy belongs on the bookshelves of founders, managers, entrepreneurs, and other business leaders exploring innovative and proven ways to scale their enterprise to new heights.

Forewords (Building the Third Way) xix

Forewords (Preparing Europe for maturity) xxvii

Introduction xxix

North Star

1 Six Dimensions of Direction 3

Purpose beyond profit

Practice 1: A company that makes the planet a better place 6

Company values

Practice 2: Guiding principles for aligning the crew 8

Business ambition

Practice 3: Business outcomes to aspire to in the long run 10

North Star metric

Practice 4: The PRIMARY metric that matters NOW 11

Value proposition

Practice 5: Unmet customer needs that you solve uniquely well 12

OKRs

Practice 6: Making direction operational 16

2 Environmental, Social and Governance Criteria as Drivers of Business Success (With Johannes enhard and Hannah Leach) 21

Environmental

Practice 7: Measuring, reducing and offsetting your environmental footprint with clear responsibilities and targets 26

Social

Practice 8: Building a culture that embraces diversity and inclusion 29

Governance

Practice 9: Establishing internal governance that facilitates growth, compliance, and employee representation 32

People & Mindset

3 People (HR) Excellence (With Constanze Buchheim, Manjuri Sinha and Chris Bell) 37

OKRs

Practice 10: Establishing the right people OKRs 40

Organizational chart and roles

Practice 11: Defining the roles & responsibilities for a people function 46

Practice 12: Scaling the right people roles at the right time 49

Recruiting & candidate experience

Practice 13: Building the candidate sourcing muscle 50

Practice 14: Evaluating candidates in record time while creating an outstanding candidate experience 55

Practice 15: Boosting the offer acceptance rates 57

Organizational development

Practice 16: Establishing a strong job architecture with clear levels, career paths and tracks 58

Practice 17: Putting fair appraisal and promotion processes in place 62

Employee experience

Practice 18: Driving employee happiness by enabling meaning, mastery, psychological safety, autonomy and community 64

Employee stock option programs

Practice 19: Building the right employee stock option program 67

4 Scale-Up Mindset (With Johannes Lenhard) 73

Obsession with customer experience

Practice 20: Improving key customer journey experiences as a top priority for leaders 74

Impossible is nothing

Practice 21: Setting impossible-is-nothing goals by thinking “and,” not “or” 77

Learn-it-all beats know-it-all

Practice 22: Embracing learning cycles by establishing psychological safety and an idea meritocracy 80

Autonomy to act

Practice 23: Empowering cross-functional teams to make decisions rapidly & independently 82

Functional Excellence In Scale-Ups

5 Product Management Excellence

(With Johnny Quach and Sven Grajetzki) 87

OKRs

Practice 24: Establishing the right product OKRs 90

Organizational chart and roles

Practice 25: Defining the roles & responsibilities for a product function 96

Practice 26: Scaling the right product roles at the right time 100

Product vision & direction

Practice 27: Developing a clear product vision and deriving your roadmap from it 102

Practice 28: Focusing your product organization on outcomes, not just designing a “feature factory” 104

Practice 29: Investing in the core product while pushing adjacent opportunities and venture bets 106

Product development process

Practice 30: Creating a crystal clear picture of your target customers 107

Practice 31: Aligning your product value proposition with the underserved needs of your customers 108

Practice 32: Developing your roadmap as a communication tool with the right prioritization logic 111

Product management basics

Practice 33: Getting the brand and product design right early on 115

Practice 34: Building a thriving user research engine quickly 119

Practice 35: Implementing best-in-class product management tools 122

6 Technology Excellence (With Christoph Richter) 129

OKRs

Practice 36: Establishing the right technology OKRs 132

Organizational chart and roles

Practice 37: Defining the roles & responsibilities for a technology function 140

Practice 38: Scaling the right technology roles at the right time 144

Your way of agile development

Practice 39: Creating your own version of agile development 145

Development operations (DevOps)

Practice 40: Establishing lean software development principles 150

Practice 41: Establishing technical DevOps practices for continuous delivery 153

Practice 42: Enabling a team of doers through the right DevOps culture 156

Scalable architecture

Practice 43: Creating a “good enough” software architecture that can evolve over time 158

Practice 44: Establishing a resilient cloud architecture 161

Information security

Practice 45: Mitigating the top 10 web applications’ security risks 163

Practice 46: Integrating the key information security practices into design, development and deployment early on 165

Data management

Practice 47: Democratizing data with self-service data tools while building a scalable data architecture 167

7 B2C Marketing Excellence (With Kelly Ford) 175

OKRs

Practice 48: Establishing the right marketing OKRs 177

Organizational chart and roles

Practice 49: Defining the roles & responsibilities for a marketing function 182

Practice 50: Scaling the right marketing roles at the right time 185

Marketing basics

Practice 51: Establishing a single source of truth for key marketing and growth KPIs 186

Practice 52: Bridging the gap between marketing quants and creative brains 186

Practice 53: Equipping your teams with the right marketing and growth tools 187

Practice 54: Finding your product-channel fit quickly and maintaining it 187

Organic and viral marketing

Practice 55: Leveraging the power of organic conversions to drive down customer acquisition costs 190

Practice 56: Getting your PR machine up with trust 192

Paid online marketing

Practice 57: Harnessing the six key hacks for buying online ads efficiently 194

Offline marketing

Practice 58: Leveraging the power of offline marketing in the digital age 197

Monetization

Practice 59: Nailing your monetization strategy to drive revenue 198

Growth hacking

Practice 60: Establishing cross-functional growth hacking teams for activation, retention and monetization 201

8 B2B Sales Excellence (With Karan Sharma) 209

OKRs

Practice 61: Establishing the right sales OKRs 212

Organizational chart and roles

Practice 62: Defining the roles & responsibilities for a sales function 217

Practice 63: Scaling the right sales roles at the right time 220

Sales playing field

Practice 64: Exploiting the right niches 221

Sales basics

Practice 65: Creating a commission plan that fits your growth stage 223

Practice 66: Enabling your sales teams with the right sales tech stack 225

Practice 67: Attracting and hiring a world-class sales team 227

Practice 68: Training and coaching a “challenger” sales team 228

Practice 69: Getting your basic sales pitch in place 230

Qualifying and closing leads

Practice 70: Becoming rigorous with lead qualifications 231

Practice 71: Enabling your sales teams to close leads 234

Retaining and “farming” customers

Practice 72: Measuring customer health to predict and prevent customer churn 235

9 Service Operations Excellence (With Dr Nicola Glusac) 241

OKRs

Practice 73: Establishing the right service operations OKRs 244

Organizational chart and roles

Practice 74: Defining the roles & responsibilities for a service operations function 247

Practice 75: Scaling the right service operations roles at the right time 250

Preventing contacts

Practice 76: Preventing unnecessary contacts in the first place 252

Deflecting contacts

Practice 77: Deflecting transactional contacts to an automated self-help 253

Resolving contacts

Practice 78: Investing in a hybrid operating model and specialization to ensure availability at all times 254

Practice 79: Resolving customer inquiries with autonomous teams and close-knit performance management 255

Practice 80: Investing in Lean Six Sigma processes while giving teams enough room to create moments of service delight 256

Practice 81: Investing in a loosely coupled, yet highly integrated suite of service tools 258

Practice 82: Steering external partners to jointly drive business goals 259

Practice 83: Boosting back-office throughput with performance management, automation and centers of excellence 260

Practice 84: Investing in resilience to quickly recover from demand and supply shocks 261

10 Supply Chain Excellence (With Matthias Wilrich) 265

OKRs

Practice 85: Establishing the right supply chain OKRs 268

Organizational chart and roles

Practice 86: Defining the roles & responsibilities for a supply chain operations function 271

Practice 87: Scaling the right supply chain roles at the right time 275

Supply chain

Practice 88: Hiring supply chain specialists early on 275

Practice 89: Investing in supply chain resilience to quickly recover from demand and supply shocks 276

Practice 90: Boosting partner and supplier relationships with smart and scalable contracts 277

Practice 91: Becoming proficient in supply chain operational excellence and maintaining a hands-on attitude 280

Growth Capital

11 Six Questions Every Growth Stage Investor Asks (With Vanessa Pinter) 287

Future vision

Practice 92: Do you capitalize on the next inflection point? 293

Rockstar team

Practice 93: Have you assembled a great team that can scale? 294

Business model

Practice 94: Does your company’s performance to date show a path toward becoming profitable in the long term? 296

Venture-scale market

Practice 95: Can you achieve USD 100 million in annual revenue within 7-10 years? 298

Category-leading product

Practice 96: Have you created a unique customer value proposition which is 10x better than any other in that market? 300

Fund fit

Practice 97: Does your company fit the investor’s fund in terms of industry, size, and funding needs? 300

12 Fifteen Key Issues in Growth Term Sheets (With Vanessa Pinter) 303

Negotiating guidelines

Practice 98: Following major guidelines for term sheet negotiations 304

Key term sheet issues

Practice 99: Negotiating the 15 most important term sheet issues during a growth round 307

Contact Us 321

Notes 323

Dr. Martin Schilling is an angel investor, startup builder, and scale-up executive. He has co-created and scaled five companies, including a McKinsey & Company subsidiary and the FinTech firm N26. He is the Managing Director of the Berlin Accelerator at Techstars.

Dr. Thomas Klugkist is a management consultant who leverages the experience and insight he gained working at leading companies and startups in Europe (N26, KPN/ Planet Internet, Klett Group, Kirch Group, JCI) to guide change processes and help exciting companies grow.

In The Builder’s Guide to the Tech Galaxy: 99 Practices to Scale Startups into Unicorn Companies, two veteran executives and entrepreneurs, a supporting team and close to 100 top scale-up experts deliver a guide in four building blocks to take your company from small start-up to unicorn: with a clear North Star to align the company’s direction, an AAA team, functional excellence in deeply specialized teams and enough growth capital. This book covers each of these topics in-depth as part of 99 practices. You’ll learn to scale without giving up too much ownership or control.

The Builder’s Guide to the Tech Galaxy provides template organizational charts, objectives, and sample OKRs for divisions like product management, technology, marketing, B2B sales, service operations, and more. It also offers tools and benchmarks for your company’s strategic alignment, tips and templates for encouraging a scale-up mindset amongst your teams. Additionally, the authors have included checklists that describe how to attract capital and negotiate term sheets.

Whether your company has two, ten or one-hundred employees, this book is the essential blueprint on how to take it through the no-man’s-land that is the middle stage of growth. It belongs in the libraries of every founder, start-up executive, manager, and business leader interested in scaling their firm.

Successfully navigate the tricky middle stages of startup growth between launch and IPO

Are you scaling a startup but don’t belong to the fortunate few who have done so multiple times already? Many startup builders simply do not have the time to read over hundreds of books, blogs, and podcasts while distilling all this information down into practical lessons.

That’s why The Builder’s Guide to the Tech Galaxy does it for you. The authors have drawn on forty years of combined experience in building companies and interviewed close to 100 top scale-up experts from successful technology companies around the world, including Airbnb, Pinterest, N26, Zalando, Salesforce, Wayfair, AWS, GetYourGuide, Klarna and Hubspot.

As a result, The Builder’s Guide to the Tech Galaxy is a handbook for startup employees, leaders, future founders, investors, corporate innovation hubs, and anyone else who is interested in entrepreneurship and scaling a technology company within months rather than years.

The authors don’t focus on how to go from zero to one nor on how to take a unicorn to IPO. Instead, they hone in on the critical scale-up stage in the middle – upgrading a small pirate ship to a large spaceship.

This book is full of practical and hands-on checklists, templates, organizational charts, benchmarks, tools, and tips you can use immediately. Confidently guide the activities of your technology and product management, marketing, B2B sales, people, and others.

The book also includes forewords by Thomas Heilmann, Christian Miele, Kulraj Smagh, Klaus Hommels, Aleksandra Laska and Joël Kaczmarek.

Whether your company has ten or a hundred employees, The Builder’s Guide is the essential playbook to scale successfully.