Playbooks & Culture
We develop playbooks and team culture throughout these three growth phases.
Stage 1: The Experiment Machine (2-15 People)
Startup Survival: When the pressure hits the ceiling, Groof helps ensures psychologicaly safety. Instead of cracking under stress, your team pulls together and grows, both individualy and as a team. This is the structural glue your startup needs to survive the struggle to PMF.
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De-risking People Risk: If you are able to hire A-Players, Groof ensures they play the ball in the right moment, without standing in each others ways. If you can't find or don't have the time to hire A-Players Groof turns your team into an A-player-like-team that does not need micromanagement and outperforms any uncoordniated group of A-player individuals.
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Safe Time (Velocity over Motion): With Groof coordination becomes smooth, no long planning, no long strategy discussions. Groof transforms the chaos into an highly reliable experiment machine: you fire off experiments in short, KPI-driven cycles, ensuring every move is a step toward Product-Market Fit, not just another lap in a circle. ​
Stage 2: Fluid Structures (15-50 People)
Staying at Speed: Groof ensures seamless onboarding and alignment through controlled self-regulation. Trained collaboration habits keep morale high and the "ride" smooth. Built-in self-repair and adaptation mechanisms maintain hygiene, trust, and your already existing performance culture, while actively preventing groupthink and common team dysfunctions.
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Fluid Team Structures: Break the silos before they form. With Groof, you can coordinate up to 50 people as one cohesive unit of rapidly forming and dissolving "Impact Initiative Teams." These squads ship features and gain market traction niche by niche - systematically unlocking the keys to Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue (AARRR).
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Easing People Pains: scalabiling usually means expensive management layers. Not with Groof. Our system allows you to run a leaner organization with significantly fewer leaders. We train your existing talent in the Groof method, enabling you to promote from within or hire quickly with confidence. Hiring becomes faster, cheaper, and more effective because you are inviting people into a culture that forms them consciously, and they will never want to leave. ​
Stage 3: Flexible Machines (>50 People)
One Team (Alignment, Buy-in, Cohesion): In Groof, every function reaches excellence through its specific playbook. Across departments, Groof installs also playbooks that get trained into inter-team habits. This fractal stacking of the playbooks integrates individual contributers not only into their immidiate teams but also into their departments, and the whole company.
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Smart Scaling: Rapid onboarding and automated leadership training make hiring seamless without losing momentum. The structures are rock-solid yet adaptable: a built-in self-alert system triggers change exactly when needed, ensuring stability is a choice, not a cage. Even Blitzscaling becomes possible without burning out your people or slowing down operations.
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Culture Continuation: We translate your values into actionable playbook items that evolve into real organizational habits. Leaders get trained through Groof's personal development tool. Also founder get feedback on their own behavior and when it is better to change the value, the playbook or your own behavior. In this way you can scale founders mode into the whole organization without running into the hypocricy trap or founder bias.
Transitions
Transitions are implemented into the system from the beginning. The playbooks contain clear agreement on how to form, evolve, and dissolve teams and structures. Whether initiated by the squad or leadership, the organization adapts through controlled experiments. We install "Early-Alert" habits that catch market signals and funnel them into a well-defined change mechanism -ensuring you pivot with precision instead of panic.
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The people transition is guided by ongoing leadership and team member training through the self-development team. This eases the founder journey from frontline soldier in phase one to organizational architect in the second and system guardian leader of leaders in the third.
How we do this.
The Groof Approach
Groof combines smart playbooks, team habit building and a simple ongoing
team hygiene routine to install a powerful operating system.
Constulting -> from zero to winning playbook.
At the start of each Groof introduction we anaylse your current playbooks, find out strengths and weaknesses and propose a new one. All Groof Playbooks declare clear tailormade Mission Protocols (how to get to an engaging and shared mission), Collab Protocols (how to align, coordinate and improve together), and Truth protocols (how to set KPI, personal and team feedback, market truth and ground truth), that lead your team into product market fit
Coaching & Training -> from playbook to performance culture.
It takes 4-8 weeks to implement and train the new playbook depending on the team's situation. In this phase the team learns to use the tools, modifies the new playbook to their needs, and creates a winning culture. With the following milestones: Playbook fully adapted and turned into habits, Team Hygiene mechanism working, team Net Promoter Score positive and first performance increase.
Groof Tools -> from performance to repeated performance.
There are two Groof tools. (1) the Groof Team Hygiene and Self-Development Tool that helps the team to stay energized and engaged, alert on problems, and playbook issues, repair breaks of trust or processes, and adapt to new circumstances. (2) the Groof Personal Self-Development tool helps team leaders to grow into great leaders, people love to work for and team members to grow into great team players, that pull the team forward together.
Advantages
1 You don't have many shots.
Don't get stuck in psychological issues, move your limits and reach PMF, traction, and your next round of funding.
2 Master the soft thing that is the hard thing.
Get a handle on your team's people & culture development, systematically and with ease.
3 Outsmart yourself.
Scale founder mode into your team, AND guardrail it when it get's toxic without you even noticing.
4 COO as a Service
Set up your self repairing operation system. If you are a COO, this is YOUR tool. If you don't have a COO this tool is doing the job for you till you get onw.
5 Max energy. One direction.
Avoid micromanagement, distraction, burnout, and painful team drama. Maximize the energy of your team and harness it in one direction instead.
6 Smooth Transition to Smart Scaling
Many startups struggle with the organizational chasm between PMF and scaling. With Groof you evolve your playbooks while keeping the culture intact.
7 Enjoy the ride
The journey stays hard, but with Groof it becomes a meaningful and fulfilling founder experience that lasts.
FAQ
1. How does Groof handle remote or asynchronous work? Groof is made perfectly for remote teambuilding. Everything is online and easily done in asynchronos settings. It creates a safe space even and great collaboration even remotely.
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2. How does Groof deal with cultural diversity? In Groof every team forms it's on culture. It gives the space and makes it much easier to address differing points of view, and sort out misunderstandings. So that in Groof you can have much more divers teams, that can really take advantage of that in a creative way.
3. Groof sounds pretty complex, how can a team handle this? It sounds complex, allthough in fact it is very simple and intuitive. It asks a couple of questions everyday, and not even all of them have to be answered every day. The process from there is very simple as the answers are put in the right place and reflected in the right group of people.
4. What are the privacy policies? Privacy is ruled by a very simple but highly effective rule: all team information stays in the team, all private information stays with the person and nobody else. This is not a management or an hr management tool, Groof is a tool to help and support the team and the people to thrive, they stay in control.
5. How does Groof manage the integration of AI Agents? The use of AI and integration of AI agents is agreed on in Collab protocols, that get introduced through experiments. In this way Groof is an ideal vehicle to introduce AI and AI Agents.
6. Does Groof also help the teams to find new ways of working together after the introduction? Yes, Groof identifies 30 drivers and levers for the three protocol areas Mission, Collab, and Truth and has 5-10 propositions for each driver and lever. One of the next features to be integrated will be an AI steered advise support that helps to improve the teams' playbooks, that then can easily be trained with Groof.
7. How long does a normal Groof analysis take? A regular Groof Analysis has three parts: the team analysis takes around 90min in a conversation between the team lead and the Groof Consultant. The Team Member analysis needs 10min per Team Member and the Team Leader analysis takes around 20min. All three rely on analysis tools and are therefore very efficient. After the Analysis we are ready to propose new playbooks and show development paths for the involved people.
More questions?
Book a demo or go to our contact Page!