This article is a playbook for CEOs on what rituals, meetings, and processes to introduce at each stage of a high-growth tech company’s journey.

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A common theme of my posts is that operating velocity is one of the most important determinants of success for a business. Operating velocity helps you create an exceptional culture and phenomenal team, both of which are critical ingredients to moving even faster. There is one other ingredient that makes or breaks the velocity of a company: its operating cadence.

By the time you cross 10 employees, as CEO, you start to ritualize key team events. Events like the “Weekly All-Hands” become a standard way that communication occurs and culture is built.

As you get bigger, these events are the “operating cadence” of a company — they are the rhythm of an organization that shape how decisions get made and how information is shared as companies scale. Different companies have different operating cadences: some companies are meeting-heavy, and some underemphasize communication; some companies develop process too early, and others too late.

As companies cross a few hundred employees, almost all communication and decision-making needs to work its way into the operating cadence. Great CEOs build their operating cadences with intentionality, thinking about what communications are critical to whom and the best forums for the communication to take place. A few principles in process design are important here:

• Unless you are a nuclear power plant, 95% of your operating cadence should be “positive process” (process that accelerates the team by reducing steps required for coordination) over “negative process” (process that is designed as a checkpoint to prevent mistakes)
• Bias towards centralized process when there’s complex cross-team coordination, and against centralized process otherwise. Design your organization to minimize these scenarios.
• Require the minimum viable number of people in meetings to make processes effective (and encourage people to not come if the process isn’t helpful)
• To avoid meeting creep, eliminate processes with meetings unless the benefit is very crisp
• Give people access to the information they need to run their parts of the business — use emails, team meetings, etc. to curate and distribute information transparently

This post walks through the key rituals that were part of the Datavant & LiveRamp operating cadence at scale (>500 employees), and then outlines what stage we added each ritual. While each subteam had its own rituals, these were the ones that made it onto my radar as key events.

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