Internship W4: #bangersquad

Vivant is quite an exceptional company.

It’s been an absolute pleasure spending time and working with the people there for the past 4 weeks and I feel like I’ve definitely grown and benefited from the experience.

I feel very fortunate. I’ve never worked in a place where they’ve placed such a high emphasis on the development of their people and ensuring that interns are learning and getting what they want out of the placements. This week in particular has been a slow wind down in terms of responsibility for Vivant specific work and in our available time at work we’ve been given free reign to work on our own projects. Which isn’t to mean that we’ve been left to our own devices and just do what we like, we’ve also got the freedom to call on people and resources around us get what we need and want to learn whilst we’re in Sydney.

This has meant that the pace has been slightly more relaxed for me than previous weeks and I’ve been in switching gears to ‘upload’ mode a lot more trying to extract as much knowledge from our mentors in Vivant as possible.

I was in a bit of a funk earlier this week as I found that one of my younger contemporaries had his company acquired through a trade sale. Whilst I’m not sure that he would have sold out for a truckload of money — just selling is an achievement in and of itself and something you can take to any investors in the future as a ‘success’. What’s more was that he’s been doing this whilst he’s also been earning a good wage + benefits with the security of a great job running an accelerator. I am absolutely happy for my mate, it’s an awesome achievement but it further served to highlight all the things I did wrong and wasn’t able to achieve in my time running Rozibaby.

It was a real kick in the guts and I was really upset for myself (ie having a sook) and basically spent a good few hours just getting down on myself — centered around opportunity lost rather than any mistake specifically. Thankfully I had Bindi there picking me up and slap me around a bit in equal measure. She rightly pointed out to me that she had faith that I could get on the bike again and just work through the solvable problems that stopped the Rozibaby business from becoming a true success.

It took me a while to get over myself but by Tuesday I was dumping all my ideas onto A3 pieces of paper and talked Bindi through my original vision of what Rozibaby could have become. By the time I was done taking her through it she couldn’t believe how big my vision was and was even more convinced that I should resurrect it — which both mentors at Vivant had also suggested.

I was less sure of that, and struck up a conversation with the founder of Vivant who happened to walk into the room and his first question was — ‘do you want to do it?’. My answer was ‘that’s what I’ve been trying to work out’ to which his answer was ‘don’t do it then, it’s not worth it’. It was an interesting answer from Anthony and I wasn’t necessarily going to fight him on that but there were also elements of what I had learned at Rozibaby that I wasn’t yet ready to totally consign to the history books yet.

One of the things I was asked to do was to do a fireside chat with the entire staff at Vivant on Wednesday facilitated by one of our mentors. This was quite good, I like sharing experiences and there were clearly a lot of experiences to share with the Vivant team who had been so generous with their time and expertise for me and helping me grow. It was only natural that I’d want to contribute back in the same way.

Speaking in front of the company was totally comfortable for me and I just rabbited on continuously with Chris having to pull me back several times to not jump too far ahead. I think that the staff got something out of it and I was flattered that people took time to hear me talk about things for a good hour and a half (meant to be 30 minutes) and was particularly chuffed when the CEO came up to me and say that my chat was as good as anything he’s paid money to see in the past. That was a serious compliment and I really appreciated it.

Throughout the rest of the week we organised specific one on one sessions with our mentors to learn about:

• Mobile Marketing and the opportunities and considerations in that space leveraging off experience of a person who ran the mobile division at Yahoo7 for several years
• Customer acquisition and running scenarios on how facilitate idea generation to get to the first $100K of revenue for a hypothetical business’s startup — through this how to set up commission structures correctly to incentivise the outcomes you want long-term not just in the short term.
• How to do A/B testing properly so it’s not just a fluke but systematic and manages risk
• How to build out a technology startup from the ground up — which basically involved getting the technical stack, information architecture and backend considerations correct before designing anything. Which unfortunately showed to me just how backwards I’ve been doing everything prior to that point
• We were shown some examples of hardcore high level business and resources planning using sprint methodologies and planning. It was phenomenal to see how resource allocation considered BAU, contingency and what projects are being worked on through Google docs with multiple stakeholders (showed how inadequate my project management subject was at Uni). Seeing how high level epics where broken down into higher levels of granularity and categorised into categories of ‘done/in progress/to be started’ 12 months in advance and how 6 weeks planning ahead was considered minimum for best practice.

We were also taken through some workshops with the team solely for our benefit even though it was going to take more time and be less ‘efficient’. This involved going through some Agile practices including Planning Poker which involved estimating features with the team with Fibonaci numbers (despite 3 out of the 4 of us not being technical).

This practice elicits multiple views and discussions around task estimation and sprint planning and stops the bullshit from developers (or anyone really) from holding up a process. It captures the value from the group upfront and actively encourages best practice, learning and where necessary negotiation and can be used for other teams e.g. design for pretty much anything that needs to be built. The concept of using Fibonnaci numbers is that the higher the numbers go (‘0’ being no difficulty and ‘infinity’ being completely unknown complexity) the harder it is to plan for and encourages the breaking down of that user story into smaller tasks and understandable stories. That is a story worth 40 points should be broken down into say 4x10 point stories that can be easier understood and developed with lower risk of being incomplete by the end of a sprint.

It was sad to leave by the end of the week and it was especially touching when the team brought us together on the Thursday to give us a couple of gifts which was a T-shirt ‘Wow So Agile, Much Lean’.

However all good things must come to an end at some point.

The night before we said ‘Sayonara’ to our now good friends Dean and Liv with a good bottle of schnapps then had our final sign-off at the Vivant offices on the Friday and we were on our way to Canberra for a couple of days. But not before we were told we had a couple of desks waiting for us in the the new Melbourne Vivant offices.

We are so lucky. We have learnt so much from being been exposed to such an outstanding culture and gained such a great network of friends, peers and mentors from it.