Startup Operations: Build Systems Before You Scale

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Up to about fifty people, a company runs on the founder remembering everything. Past that, memory stops working and the flexibility starts looking like chaos.

Twelve new people and everything got slower

Two teams are quietly doing the same work and neither knows it. Nobody can say who makes a particular decision, so it gets made three times. You hired ahead of revenue because that is what you were told to do, and now payroll is the largest number on the page and the runway is shorter than the plan. The org chart exists on a slide from last quarter and no longer matches anyone's actual job. And the engineering hire that determines your product speed has been open for four months, because nobody in the company knows where developers are or what to say to them.

What this course covers

Forty-four lessons that build the operational base in order. The function first: why operations appears after fifty people and how it differs from project management, what a process is and what it is not, mapping the key processes, where formalisation helps and where it does harm, why metrics fail in most companies, input against output against outcome, leading and lagging indicators, bottlenecks, queues and context switching, quick wins, operating rhythms across the week, month and quarter, resistance and sabotage, when a spreadsheet beats a corporate system, and the return on the function itself. Then structure: the five steps of organisational design, the star model, six design drivers, organisational archetypes, three types of matrix, levels of management and how power distributes in a matrix, designing the leadership layer, top-level accountability, span of control, and moving to a new structure all at once or in phases. Then headcount: full-time equivalents, gap analysis, forecasting demand with Delphi and nominal group methods, job design and workload analysis, and seven documented ways to reduce headcount cost without firing anyone. Then the people system a founder personally owns: what the function costs and returns, running the audit yourself, the ten basic tools and the order to build them, hiring and onboarding, total rewards and grading, the profile of your first senior people hire, the scorecard to assess them, probation tasks, and whether to give equity. Then the hardest hire: technical roles and levels, where developers are, talent mapping, boolean search, fifty sources, passive candidate tools, and messages developers actually reply to. Finally the short runway: hiring into uncertainty, reducing payroll and benefits in the least damaging order, development at zero budget, choosing who goes, delivering the news, and the contingency plan.

Three blocks recorded for a people-function audience

The founder-facing people block, the technical hiring block and the crisis block were recorded for that audience, and their examples talk about hiring, pay and layoffs directly. For a company under a hundred people that is not a neighbouring topic — it is the operational work itself. Payroll is the largest cost line, the engineering hire sets your product speed, and when the runway shortens the founder makes those calls personally. The operations, structure and headcount blocks are general.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 44 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: process mapping, the input-output-outcome model, the star model and six design drivers, span of control, gap analysis, full-time equivalents, the seven cost-reduction methods, the ten basic people tools, the assessment scorecard, boolean search strings and outreach templates

• Real company structures taken apart, including ones that did not work

Where to start

Write down who makes the three decisions that most often get stuck. If more than one name appears against any of them, that is your first structural problem. Enrol now and start today.