Balancing Speed and Thoroughness
Thoughts on scrappiness and engineering
He was always at his best in a pinch. A combination of practical skills and scientific knowledge made him adaptable and ready for anything. His solutions weren’t polished, but they got the job done and saved countless lives in the process. If you’re handcuffed to a cargo container that’s sinking into the ocean and all you have is a paperclip, stick of chewing gum, and a roll of duck-tape, MacGyver was the guy you wanted strapped next to you.
When survival is unlikely, scrappiness prevails. The attitude and actions required to stay alive are different, and often counter, to those required to grow and thrive.
The early days of an organization aren’t much different. Survival is the name of the game. With most teams failing to reach a viable business, investing in unshakable infrastructure can be too costly and unnecessary. Matthew, a cofounder and Head of Product, did a remarkable job during this season. While he may define his lack of programmings as a weakness, his resourceful and tenacity were exactly what the organization needed. In a word where most startups get lost ‘building for scale’, New Story was forced to start with things that didn’t scale. It was invaluable.
New Story’s first donation system was rudimentary. It was flooded with manual chores and loosely connected services. We used Webflow for the site, Moonclerk (connected to Stripe) for payments, Zapier so things would talk to each other, multiple Excel docs to aggregate data, and a myriad or other tools and services.
One of my favorites stories I’ve heard from the early days involved Brett, our CEO, talking to a donor who didn’t see a families progress bar increase after the donation. While Brett reassured them that everything went through, Matthew is frantically calculating the remaining balance and updating the website. It was high touch and hectic at times but the benefits of staying flexible outweighed the costs. With little technical chops, a team of 4 founders (and an army of volunteers and donors) funded over a hundred homes within the first year. It wasn’t perfect, but the haphazard nature of the early processes allowed the team to proved the concept and donors to experience the greater vision.
As thoughtful trends and processes were tested and refined, it was clear that things needed more structure. The once tolerable pains and headaches in the early days begin to compound. This tension and hardship is a result of technical debt. The backlog of shortcuts and half-measures creates limitations that eventually have to be addressed. In anticipation of further growth, engineered solutions became a much greater need.
The chronic pains began getting addressed by longer term solutions. In many cases, we replaced off-the-shelf software with custom tools designed to fit our needs. We reflected on our learnings and engineered impactful solutions. Instead of hiring a team to manage the chaos, we’ve been employing technology and pursuing a stabile infrastructure to champion our next season of growth.
Summary
The fast moving, low commitment approach is an asset at first, but becomes a limitation as the organization shift from ‘survive’ to ‘thrive’.
What got use here won’t be what gets us there. That’s not a problem, it’s part of the process.
