Scaling Your Time: The Company Dossier
Written artifacts like memos, dossiers, and playbooks are ways to force clear, concise thinking and share with anyone.
Founders spend a lot of time repeating their narrative and providing context to prospective employees, consultants, vendors, advisors, etc.
As the tech world adopts more asynchronous communication, a company dossier can bring new people up to speed faster and with more consistency. The content itself may vary from company to company and will evolve through time but a great way to scale a founder’s time.
Here’s an example table of contents:
Company Overview
- What is your company building and why?
- What's your founding story?
- Key metrics on your business
- Investor profile, fundraising milestones and advisory networkMission & Values
- What is your company's north star (ie. the 100-year purpose that doesn't change even though your mission and what you do may change)
- What are the driving principles of your company? Here's a fantastic guide with examples from category-defining companiesPeople
- Brief bios and duties of founding team and execs.
- What are your team's strengths and weaknesses?
- What are the key hires you need to make?Market & Ideal Customer Profile
- What is the narrowest definition of ideal customer profile for your product? What are some secondary profiles you are testing?
- What is the status quo and incumbents in the space? How do you differentiate and position yourself differently?
- Who are you selling to (buyer personas)? What are the pain points, sensitivities, and organizational politics that you commonly encounter?Product
- What is the current state of your product? What's the tech infrastructure and key external libraries you are using?
- What are the hero features and core usage cases?
- What do you plan to do with the product over the next 6–18 months?GTM Strategy
- Who are your customers? What commonalities (demographic, why they bought, how you engaged them, etc.) exist amongst your customers to inform what's working?
- What is your strategic narrative (the change you're trying to make in the world)? Example of how to define your Strategic Narrative.
- How are you building awareness for your company and product? What channels have you experimented with? What channels do you want to experiment with?Sales Strategy
- What are your key sales metrics and what does your sales process and infrastructure (sales tools) look like?
- How have you acquired customers to date? Who is doing the selling?
- Who is currently engaging and managing the success of customers?What does the customer journey look like post sales?
The particular sections and what you may want to cover may vary from company to company but the point is that this exercise helps clarify and bring consistency to the founder’s vision being communicated to all parties. We have also found this exercise often inspires a discussion around core questions and help align differing opinions.
