There is one never-ending fight in FinTech startups and it’s all about who is more important: developers vs sales vs everyone else?

• Developers and product teams often think they are the only ones “working” on the product and all the marketing, sales, and PR buzz is just noise. 
• Marketing and salespeople, on the other side, are convinced that they are the ones left with all the heavy lifting because nobody understands how hard it is to sell a product in an overly saturated busy market where everyone is competing, ads costs are increasing, nobody takes your calls, you don’t yet have a brand name, your product is not perfect and you don’t even know when it’s going to be ready. Because of the scrum agile philosophy developers won’t commit to any deadlines and tell you “we will be ready when we are ready…”
• Back office and admin functions within startups (and everywhere else for the most part) always feel they are being taken for granted and are asked to sign off and approve or “handle” issues last minute.
• Nobody really understands why do you need an HR department, except for firing and hiring people, which everyone hates anyway but everyone has an opinion about leadership, motivation, free lunches, and company culture.

So how do we make all the functions appreciate each other and understand the complexity of everything that’s happening? 🤔

I have read a book called “Clockwork” which introduces an interesting concept of a QBR which is – Queen B 🐝 Role. Essentially, QBR is the most important function that is essential for the company or organizational survival and everything else must be subordinated to that. This is something that you cannot delegate or outsource. In a hive, Queen B’s function of reproduction must be protected at all times, which is why queen B is not involved in any other activities and must be protected by everyone else.

• If Queen B is distracted or killed flying around daisies, things will go wrong.
• If doctors in the E.R. spend a lot of time dealing with paperwork, insurance claims, or cleaning rooms instead of saving patients, things will go wrong.
• If Yana spends too much time polishing her website design or doing her own expense claims instead of learning about new regulations and helping customers and clients solve their problems, she will burn out and things will go wrong.

Why I love this concept is because it suggests that when a team or a company runs into issues or problems, in 99% of the cases it is not because they don’t do enough but because they need to stop doing non-essential tasks. The solution almost always is “stop doing XXX” instead of “do more”.