During a startup's early stages, you need people who can get things done.

No matter how difficult the challenge is or how much unknown there is, building things from 0 to 1 is what you optimise for.

When the product launches and things start to stabilise around a few key processes, what you were doing early on will start to break down.

Before, you can do a quick one-hour meeting and then execute and launch something the next day. When your product matures, you need to to put a lot of planning on what you want to do and why you want to do those things.

For execution-junkies, this requires a big change in mindset. You need to slow down and methodically plan things step by step. You also need to get buy in from all the parties involved – upper management, marketing, sales, engineering, customer success.

Here is a simple framework to keep in mind when transitioning to this new startup stage:

• Identify the why - What are the benefits of doing this? Starting discussions with the why will get everyone aligned on the goal. A simple way to get everyone on board is to always explain it as being "good for business" as you can rarely reject something that is good for business.
• Lay out the what - What are the things that must be done to achieve the goal laid out in the why? List down the items that must be accomplished and assign people to those tasks.
• Agree on the when - Come up with an optimistic but hard to reach target. Commit to it.
• Debate on the how - If you do a good job with the why and get everyone aligned, you will have wiggle room to debate on the how. There can be many different ways of accomplishing the goal and all of them might be valid, so this is where you can iterate with rounds of meetings and execution details.

Gone are the days of rapid execution, rapid failures, and rapid learnings. In return, you do more planning and get repeatable and scalable successes.