RevenueCat has an incredibly ambitious goal: to build a public company by the end of the decade by helping developers make money.
A company is two things: people and information and we need to be intentional about both. To become a publicly traded company, we need a team that is capable of hitting incredibly ambitious goals. That team is a winning team. Being a winning team means executing on things we know will further our mission, consistently and with excellence. A winning team doesn’t mean never losing. It means owning it when we do, learning, and always pushing to hit our ambitious goals.
Being on a winning team isn’t comfortable, but can be incredibly rewarding. Achieving our goals will push you in everything you do. It will induce growth, both personal and professional, that you will have with you your entire life. Both the company and the teammate should both get more out of the relationship than each put in: a positive sum exchange.
Winning teams are built, and we need to be the ones to build it. No single hire will make us a “winning team”. Building a winning team is understanding that through continuous investment and mutual accountability we can continue to improve. In order to take on this work we must get comfortable with the mechanics of team building. There are three ways a team changes: new hires, development, and departures. We need to handle all three well to build a winning team.
When hiring, we should aim to hire the best possible candidates we can. Always. It’s much more important that we build towards a winning team than it is to hit some headcount goal. Candidates that move us towards being a winning team are impressive in the interview process. After the interviews are completed, there will be a strong body of evidence that this candidate can exceed the expectations for the role and bring us closer to being a winning team. Hiring anybody that doesn’t clearly exceed that standard is a compromise not worth the risk. Passing on a hire is much less costly than compromising our winning team status. If a hiring manager doesn’t have “Strong Yes” conviction, then it’s a no.
Once someone is in the door, it’s our job to help them grow. A steady flow of challenging, impactful work will do this naturally, but we have to supercharge this with opportunities, resources, and constant feedback. When we can, we promote people from within, even when it’s a stretch. If someone can do their job even better, we tell them how. Pushing people while supporting them is how we’ll build winning teams. Being a manager at RevenueCat means developing teams, not just managing them.
The final and hardest aspect of building a winning team is navigating departures, inconsistent performance, and terminations. There are no guaranteed seats at RevenueCat and the expectation is that everyone is consistently moving the company forward. When that’s not the case, we must address it head on, but with empathy. We won’t build a winning team without doing this work. This starts by managers being very explicit in expectations, and being especially explicit when they aren’t met. Every individual is responsible for their own performance, but managers have the burden of addressing that performance when it’s not met. It’s hard work but it’s part of the process we must get comfortable with to build a winning team.
Building a winning team is never ending for us. We will have success and failures, but if we can internalize the vision and enshrine it via process, I think it will give us a self-sustaining talent machine that will keep RevenueCat a place where we can do incredibly ambitious things.
– Jacob