Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours (17 page)

Plane.ly founder Nick Martin had previous experience working with a different project management model called the
waterfall method
. This occurs when you specify a whole bunch of functionality about what a website should do up front. Basically, you put as much in it as possible; then, that specification gets passed from the people who designed it to the people who are going to build it. Those people then build it for a certain amount of time until it's finished. Then there's another team that normally takes over the testing of it. Once it's been tested, and it's signed off, then it goes into production and gets released.

Martin says he became frustrated with this model quickly, and explains, “The problem with the waterfall methodology is that while a specification is being developed and tested, the designers usually get some great new ideas that they want to throw into the mix.” So, you either tell the designers they can't integrate those new ideas because it's too late; or, they incorporate the ideas, and then the rest of the team isn't ready for that. Those new ideas get passed through the development and testing phases. And then the different teams will go back and forth. Martin says, “Unless you're very disciplined, you end up with a situation where nothing ever gets released.”

Nick remembers one particularly difficult entrepreneur he encountered while working for a startup in Australia. “We had an amazingly inspirational product manager who was kind of responsible for the product design and all the features that [we incorporated]. His brain never turned off, and he was always getting new ideas.” While this sounds like a good thing in principle, Nick recalls, “I was the test manager at that stage, so I'd be testing about a specification he had written, but then he'd be writing another one by the time any development ever got to me.”

Using other project management techniques can help a team avoid this kind of frustration. The
scrum board
, which we talked about a bit in the last chapter, is one tool we find effective in avoiding this kind of back and forth and internal argument. It's a way of organizing work by type and by stage in the process. It might, for instance, be a marketing task that goes from “needs to be done” to “in progress” to “done.” It's a way of visualizing where everyone is in the process. It means that you need only look up for a moment to see where your colleagues are and what they are working on at that moment. In other words, you don't need to keep interrupting to ask.

When these
sprints
are done, a product can be released. The most important mantra behind these methodologies is
release early, release often
. Don't sit on your ideas or your products for too long. Let customers have a look at them, give you feedback, and then change the product to adapt to their needs.

Startup Weekend also demonstrates very easily the utility of some of these tools. If you volunteer to do a particular task for your team, you have to get it done. Everyone knows exactly the tasks for which they are responsible. Jim Benson, who does lean consulting for large companies like Comcast, explains what he likes about Startup Weekend: “You come into a very respectful egalitarian system. You assume that when your teammates sit down at a table and they say, ‘I can do this,’ that they can do this. And the rate at which you check each other's work is so rapid that you immediately know whether or not someone can deliver on what they say.”

Benson says, “People have to be [entirely] honest about what their capabilities actually are, because there's no time to bury it.” For example, he says, “If you say, ‘Right now I will cook you a chicken,’ and then you don't know how to cook a chicken, people are going to figure out pretty quickly when you take the raw chicken and put it in the microwave.”

Communication Is Key

The initial brainstorming that is required to produce a scrum board, or any similar kind of chart, also encourages the entire team to make sure their ideas are heard. Usually, one or two people tend to dominate the conversation in large groups that are under time pressure. These individuals may be smart or simply like the sound of their own voices; however, they tend to intimidate their fellow team members and cause others to be reluctant to participate. We're pretty confident that just about everyone who comes to Startup Weekend has something to contribute to the team. So it's important to hear everyone out, particularly at the beginning of the process.

Jeremy Lightsmith says that some of the biggest problems he sees in startups are those that involve communication. In short, someone is not being heard, or there is duplication on a project. One part of the team hasn't passed on some vital piece of information to another.

One startup veteran told us that he will lead the team if it's his idea that's being discussed, but only in a particular way: “The way I work these days is to run workshops with these big pieces of brown paper on the wall. [I then give] everyone a pack of Post-it notes.” The group leader sets up the problem, but then asks everyone in the group how they are going to solve it. He says, “It's not going to be my idea; it's going to be [everyone]'s ideas. I'll [ultimately] be accountable for the results, but it's going to be coming from [others as well].”

This approach has other benefits, too; first, it sets the tone for the way in which the group will work. Anyone can feel comfortable to share her ideas through the course of the weekend. Also, people sometimes just have these ideas in the back of their heads. Even if the team doesn't have time to accomplish every idea over the weekend, just getting them out there will allow people to put them aside and possibly come back to them later.

The techniques we encourage people to employ at Startup Weekend can also make them more effective leaders. In a traditional method of project management, everything is planned out ahead of time, and any changes along the way seem to come from the top. However, conducting extensive customer development and then releasing only the minimum viable product allows startup founders to eliminate some of the frustration that their colleagues will feel in the process. There will be more input from the whole team at the beginning of the process. Then, any changes that occur will be based on new evidence that is gathered—not some lightning bolt of inspiration that just happened to strike the leader while everyone else was doing their jobs. The seemingly arbitrary way in which some team leaders change their minds can lead to incredible frustration on the part of their colleagues.

One Startup veteran illustrates this point by discussing the difference between Captain Kirk of
Star Trek
and Jean-Luc Picard of
Star Trek: The Next Generation.
He says,

Kirk was kind of the swashbuckling hero who if there was a plan to go down to kick some alien butt, he would be the one leading the team right from the front, and he'd be first one saying, ‘Beam me down, Scotty.’ Picard, on the other hand, would always stay back at the ship and allow his guys to go come up with the ideas and have all the glory. He'd just sit back in the chair, ask for ideas, and then pick the best one.

In other words, the best leaders are the ones who generate capability and capacity in their staff.

Combining the pace of Startup Weekend with one of the agile methods of dividing up tasks makes everything more transparent. And that can have excellent benefits for startups.

Stick with the Basics

Nick Martin had actually done a lot of reading about lean and agile approaches to business before coming to Startup Weekend. He says: “I was eager to test it out and get involved. The whole concept of basically winning customers who are willing to pay for your product before you get to the point where you even start developing that product [made complete sense]. It's an incredibly attractive idea for anyone who's running a business.”

Lean or agile methodologies instruct founders to invest in staying small, streamlining operations, incorporating customer feedback, and pivoting often. The idea is to listen to your customers, adapt quickly, and remain true to your core competencies. While many lean/agile theories are ideal for young companies that are still in the flexible and somewhat ambiguous market penetration or the early growth stages, it makes sense to introduce them at events like Startup Weekend.

In a sense, Startup Weekend teams and ideas are pre-lean/agile. Ideas were pitched (or dreamed up) mere hours ago, and team members were complete strangers when they arrived at the event. It may be a bit premature to expect adherence to Lean practices when you're still trying to explain what your product or service
is
. But lean/agile methodologies still have a lot to offer hours-old ventures. The principles of streamlining operations, organizing projects by task lifecycle rather than competencies, incorporating customer feedback, and pivoting early and often are extremely relevant.

At Startup Weekend, we want people to envision the development of startups as a loop. Come up with an idea, ask people about it, release a minimum viable product, ask people to test it, revise the product, ask them to test it again. This refining process allows you to correct missteps along the way quickly. If Startup Weekend participants start to use these processes early, then they will learn to integrate them into all of their entrepreneurial ventures.

Interestingly, one of the areas in which people pivot most often is that of monetization. While the question of where your money will come from is the key to the whole enterprise in a traditional business plan, there has to be a different mentality in startups. For example, while individuals might not be willing to pay for a website that allows you to save for trips as a group, travel companies will be interested in reaching those groups. Maybe you have a great search engine but it is not the people using Google who are paying for it; it's the companies that want their ads to come up with the search.

Nick Martin wasn't sure that individuals would be willing to pay for a service that allowed them to meet other people in airports. Although he has had a website up for several months now, his team is still working on the question of who is going to pay for their service. Recently, Martin has started considering the fact that multinational corporations might be his key customers. One of his users asked him about this possibility. He says, “I called them up and went through a customer interview with them to understand what it was that their problems were. Now I'm repeating that process with as many multinationals as I can find.”

Nick has been using these lean/agile ideas since he launched his company. It is hard to start using these ideas when you are in the middle of launching a business, particularly one that has already received some funding. Investors expect a product with particular features at a particular time, in addition to some returns. If you scrap the whole plan and decide to go back to the customers in the middle of the process, your stakeholders may get upset.

This is precisely why Startup Weekend is the perfect venue to test some of this out. Is your team divided over a possible feature? Are you clueless as to what the graphic designer sitting next to you is doing and how it relates to your task? Do you feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that have to be accomplished? In all of these situations—situations that every Startup Weekend team faces at least once during the weekend—lean/agile methodologies can help with decision-making, product/service development, and task management. Adopting these tools and methodologies does not increase output during the Startup Weekend 54-hour frenzy of activity; however, it does improve the quality of the output. And that can mean a world of difference to a judging panel trying to determine the future viability of your startup.