I guess ‘winter’ has started, but that’s not what I want to talk about. As Meenah mentioned in the last update, it is more of a distraction for us, as we believe our product and business model should be able to weather the storm. 

What I want to talk about is company building.

As we geared up for our open launch in May, we were still in the process of hiring for some key roles. This meant that whoever joined had little time to trot or warm up, and was thrown directly onto a galloping horse. We knew that things would break, and they did. From the product and dev teams scrambling to put out a stable release, to the growth team struggling to get all the ad managers, campaigns and collaterals up and running to the design team being pulled in every direction by every other team! I would be lying if I said things were not chaotic. 

On top of this internal overheating, the external climate did not help either. Islamabad went into lockdown for a week with tens of thousands of protestors marching into the capital on one side and barricades and police forces trying to stop them from advancing on the other. Considering all these things, we had to delay our launch by a week as well.

It was indeed a bummer, but there is always a silver lining.  This extra time gave all of us a chance to take a deep breath and work on building the foundation on which the structure of Metric will rest. We had our first weekly townhall where we discussed how this chaos is not sustainable. Experienced people in each team proceeded to create systems, workflows, processes and SOPs to streamline their work. Everyone wanted to produce their best work, and they realized that they could only do that if they were in control of how work was being done.

While trying to build a high growth company, you are so focused on ‘business building’ that you might forget ‘company building’. The latter is what helps you succeed in the long run. I am glad we got a chance to pause for a second and figure this out due to the protests.

We saw immediate results. Within a couple of days, you could almost feel how everything started running much more smoothly. There was a calm in the office. We all knew exactly what we needed to do and how we needed to allocate resources to get it done in the most efficient manner. Everyone was still galloping  – but had taken control of the reins.

We were ready to launch.

– OpK