Startup, Scaleup, Screwup.

Epilogue

 

The whiteboard was nearly full when Sasa Stamenkovic, chief lean and agile coach, finished drawing how iZettle in Stockholm had reorganized themselves into a new organizational structure.

We are trying to work with … call it values streams or domains (or whatever you want to call them). They take a product to market, which includes discovery, product development, marketing, sales, the whole business. We try to make those as streamlined as possible throughout the whole business. So it’s not like product design has their flow, and then it goes to marketing, and then sales. No, it’s more like a cross-functional go-to-market team that takes care of everything, including the feedback that goes back to development. Does that make sense?

Sasa Stamenkovic, chief lean and agile coach at iZettle, Stockholm, Sweden

 

Yes, that makes total sense to me. Call them business models, value streams, domains, or value units. I don’t care much about the specific terminology. We mean the same thing. Our point of focus in business is the value-creating entity, which we can describe as a business model or a value stream, plus everyone who is involved in creating and maintaining it.

This value unit has a typical growth path that I describe with the Shiftup Business Lifecycle. It starts up, ...