Startup Project Management and Product Development
How to leave no stone unturned
In any start-up, there is a lot of doubt about the project you are working on. Unlike a cozy corporate job, you don’t have the luxury of numbers, studies, past performance, big team… you do what you can with the resources you have, then buy the rest.
Most of that doubt is due to too many variables, too little numbers and no market action — it’s normal, you are just starting up — while there is no magic bullet, there are ways to minimize the risk and clarify the road ahead for a better, more effective execution.
Discovery
This is the first step and one that requires continuous iteration over time and it ensures that the small or large adjustments in the direction of the company are made using educated guesses because that’s what they are: guesses.
What is the opportunity?
How did I find the opportunity?
Is it a single case, niche case or industry wide problem?
Is it a problem at all?
Who is my target customer? What age? Gender?
Where does he live? What does he like? How can I ask him stuff?
What’s the best way to target them?
What channels? What costs? What result?
It seems like a lot to ask out of step one, but if done right, a lot of these partial answers will come in very handy later on
Definition
The most important part of the definition is how you measure the impact. Take the time and develop your formulas, ask experts, even pay for them if you have to. Unless you can measure, you can’t see
What needs do I satisfy? Does it fix the problem?
Is this a product or a feature?
How can I measure what I’m doing?
What formula tells me the impact?
Who are the competitors?
Design
Ahh… The lipstick on the pig is the most important part. It defines the way the users interact with your system, it structures functions into usable interactions and it is the tipping point to success or failure.
“The best design” is the one you do by systematic observation of the human interaction with your system. It’s called Ethnography and is a very well defined set of procedures. Learn it, live it, do it! It will save your company!
Development
The confusing torment of choosing between the world-changing features that will define a new way, a new market, a new universe, in a way that NOBODY has thought about before.
— Hold on there sparky. You may be famous and brilliant in your own backyard but the world has its own set of rules and “what if I told you…”, “most disruptive”, “world class” are what you write in your business plan when you have no idea what you are doing yet.
Development is about structuring priorities, intensive analysis and deploy quick schemes. Get it open source, don’t re-write everything, do it fast and do it well. Don’t worry about the bugs, this too shall pass
Here’s a bit of help from a former US President on how to decide what you do and when (“Delegating” is hard when you are the lead developer and cleaning lady, but you have to believe your lies or other’s won’t)
Delivery
In a modern landscape, this would probably mean just publishing the code to whatever automatic deployment you started using.
Job done!
Well, not really. This is where it all begins. This is the baseline of code, design, integration, service, use and interaction that you needed in order to calculate the direction that your business will take in the short term.
What bugs do I have?
What’s missing?
How many clicks to start working?
Do people like it?
Are they only saying that because they are polite? ( I hate polite friends! )
How many seconds does it take to figure the product out?
I’ll leave you to ponder with a little graphic of New Product Development funnel. Ignore the money… You won’t see it for a while
