"Other Duties As Required"

You know how you read a job description and at the end it says “and other duties as required”? That’s the perfect description of life in a startup. Well, except it should probably be the first sentence in the job description instead of the last. 

Wearing multiple hats in a startup is a necessity. There are about 25 roles that need to be filled in a SaaS startup but we only have 11 employees.  So, our Go-To-Market Lead is also researching our new AI-based support system, our CTO is tracking down whether we’ve all implemented two-factor authentication, and our CEO does the accounting. Our director of engineering coordinated the lunch orders at our recent company meeting — you get the idea. It’s “all hands on deck” to get this company up and running.

Of course, “other duties as required” doesn’t just mean pitching in as needed, sometimes it means leveraging all the skills in your toolbox to help the company succeed. Our Go-To-Market Lead was a lawyer earlier in his career – so he gets to review contracts and help hire outside counsel. And our Solutions Engineering Lead is also running our marketing efforts and analyzing our social analytics, because, well, he’s good at it. In a larger company, those tasks might be seen as stepping outside the lines. In a startup, they’re signs of initiative and determination to succeed.

So while hiring at a startup requires choosing folks who have the right skills for their assigned roles, a can-do attitude, flexibility, and a general willingness to pitch in as-needed for the general good are also essential traits. However, at the same time we also have to try and be efficient as possible — we have a SaaS product to be built, and spending time ordering pizza isn’t getting CodeCargo’s product any closer to production status. 

This atmosphere can sometimes feel slightly chaotic but also empowering and stretches us as individuals. People learn things they never would in a more rigid environment. We’ve become more aware of how different functions intersect.  And it has created something powerful: a team that’s aligned, scrappy, and focused on building something meaningful together.

We’ve been lucky enough to cobble together a team of do-whatever-it-takes Cargonauts to get this ship off the ground. And in time, we’ll be able to add some additional teammates and roles so that engineers can engineer and our CEO can get his head out of the spreadsheets.  

But in general, working together to do what is needed to create success does engender a feeling of teamwork and camaraderie that’s really valuable. Knowing that we’ll all help each other to get the week’s urgent tasks done is how culture is created and strengthened. So the next time you look at a startup job description, don’t just gloss over those last four words….other duties as required…they probably really mean it.