Early-Growth Best Practices: Team Communication & Meeting Cadence
This note is most appropriate for startup founders who are growing their team head count (20 - 30+ people) but have yet to hire out their VP layer (which normally happens at the Series B+). The purpose is to provide guidance to some best practices so that the founding team can continue to lead the way without being overwhelmed with 1:1 meetings.
The main struggles founders want to avoid during this early-growth stage of their company:
Too much information sharing during meetings versus proactive problem-solving and blocking/tackling.
Increasing time spans to get to truth (no documented single source of truth or trustworthy dashboards).
Being the problem-solver for everybody’s struggles versus enabling team members to propose solutions and either requesting feedback, quick approval, or additional resources.
Difficulty in patterning new desired behaviors they would like to see across their company. Or, difficulty in addressing dysfunctional patterns of behavior.
The main struggles employees want to avoid during this early-growth stage of company-building:
Unclear how the company is tracking against its goals and where their efforts fit in that context.
Feeling a lack of psychological safety from leadership through consistent, reliable communication.
Ambiguity about what functional behaviors are good for the company culture and what functional behaviors are bad.
Note: What is shared here are observations across numerous founders at the early-growth phases of startup company building (mature Seed to B). They are not prescriptive. Rather, they serve to provide first-principle guidance so that you can develop your effective style of leadership and management.
1: Weekly All-Hands (30 - 45 mins)
Purpose:
Create a predictable, consistent rhythm,
Reinforce priorities and clarify any misunderstandings.
Encourage functional patterns of behavior.
Discourage dysfunctional patterns of behavior.
In Action: Here is a simple all-hands meeting structure you can use. You can have a simple slide to prompt you if you are using presentation facilities.
Progress: a simple sharing of how the team is tracking against their quarterly and annual goals (OKRs).
Key Shout-outs: call out key wins and highlight individuals who are modeling the behaviors you want to see at scale (e.g. ownership, proactive problem-solving, speed, collaboration, customer-centricity).
Weekly focus: Remind the team what a successful week looks like and how it will tie back to monthly/quarterly/yearly goals.
Feedback: What’s working and what’s not. Specifically, what patterns of behavior are working and what new patterns of behavior do you want to see across the board.
AMA: Optional AMA for any questions or reflections.
Note: As you scale out your leadership layer, you can start moving these all-hands to biweekly. The main thing to focus on is creating predictability and a strong drum beat.
2: Weekly Functional Huddles (GTM, P&E, People & Ops)
Purpose:
Regular 1:1 capacity maxes out quickly. For a co-founding team duo (seller and builder), their 1:1 capacity maxes out as they approach 20 FTE.
Functional huddles help you move the needle, stay close to how team members are progressing, and where necessary, provide more 1:1 support.
For new hires and key hires whom you want to retain, you may want to have regular 1:1 syncs anyway (more in a later section), however, you might make these syncs shorter (15-20 mins) and less frequent (e.g. other week or monthly).
In Action:
Meeting hygiene: These huddles work best when everyone arrives having read the context and pre-work, so the time is used for decision-making and alignment, not updates.
Choreography: It is suggested that someone is the meeting chair to keep the team focused and on time with the agenda. This is typically either CoS or a BizOps person. A simple agenda is as follows:
Progress against key goals.
Key decisions and need input.
Blockers and resolutions.
Actions and owners.
Note: Most of these meetings follow the standard structure of “Progress, Problems, Priorities.”
3: 1:1’s with Key Hires (30min)
Purpose:
Retain good people by strengthening relationships. Every employee wants to feel seen, heard, and valued. Especially by the CEO and founders.
Provide a forum from which you can identify any risk of performing employees leaving the company.
Identify growth opportunities for key individuals in the company.
In Action:
Per Month: With employees that are fully ramped up and require minimal input.
Biweekly or Weekly: New hires or individuals whom you work more closely with on specific initiatives (e.g. your in-house recruiter or your CoS). As your company scales, you can have monthly or bimonthly onboarding sessions with people who join the company. These are typically done in groups of 5-10.
4: Encourage a Writing-First Culture
Purpose:
Promote a writing-first approach to align context, create single sources of truth. For in-person cultures, it is normal and good for people to be able to share information at the coffee machine or as they are walking about. However, sometimes that information needs to be shared across the org as it impacts numerous people.
Encouraging a writing-first culture helps scale these important insights/conversations rather than relying on numerous 1:1’s or other group meetings.
Writing forces clarity of thought– numerous seasoned CEOs report that when employees write their thoughts down, they often solve their own problems before needing to approach their leader or a founding team member.
In Action:
Functional Meetings (GTM, Product & Eng, People & Ops): Have a prepared agenda (doesn’t need to be too formal) that provides context (whom, what, where, when), focus items, and key ask. These are short pre-reads.
Internal Doc: Most founders use a Notion or Google docs where there is a single source of truth.
1:1 Meetings: Encourage individuals to write down key things such as progress, problems, and priorities. This helps them organize their thinking so that you can unblock them quickly and come prepared with suggested paths forward versus relying on you to do their thinking.
5: Intentional Communications
Purpose:
Be explicit about your intentions through your communications versus leaving people to guess and creatively interpret. It’s important that what you say is also what the other party hears.
In Action: This is good guidance for any form of communication, whether it be slack channels, emails, or in-persons.
Be clear what you want from a group or an individual you are broadcasting to:
Is it an FYI (no action)?
Is it a request for feedback?
Is it a request for someone to own and then action?
Use behaviorally specific examples when providing feedback so people can clearly see what the consequences of their action or inactions are:
“When you … [[insert observed behavior]] … I notice …. [[insert negative consequence]].”
Inspire accountability through your communication by making sure key actions and outcomes exhibit following traits.
Clear definition of what success looks like.
Clear owner.
Clear deadline.
Clear sense of consequences (impact to the business if it is done well, impact to the business and others if it is not done well).
Clear idea of what resources the individual has or does not have at their disposal.
6: How You’ll Know This Is Working
Meetings shift from updates to decision-making. Pre-reads and written context allow team members to show up prepared and ready to engage on solutions and tradeoffs.
Leaders are no longer the bottleneck. Team members begin proposing solutions and making decisions within their scope, reducing dependency on founders for everything.
Increased cross-functional collaboration and aligning. Teams are consistently referencing shared documents, goals, and OKRs in discussions, signaling that a single source of truth is in use.
Cultural behaviors are reinforced. You see more shout-outs, proactive problem-solving, and ownership behaviors being celebrated and mirrored across the team.
Fewer surprises. Weekly and biweekly touchpoints surface blockers early, and fewer fires are escalated last-minute.
Higher retention and engagement. Employees feel heard, seen, and valued through consistent communication and clear prioritization.
Faster iteration cycles. With alignment around what matters most each week/month, the company moves faster and stays focused on outcomes.