project-management, management, minimum-viable-productI have a question. Me and 4 other students developed an App and we finally released the App. Now we are pretty much a very small startup. The problem is that we are 5 founders and everyone wants to be part of an decision. Is it best practice to discuss literally everything and let everyone take part in the discussion?
Or e.g. you have a designer he makes one/two designs and the others are just allowed to choose one. The backend developer develops and the others have to deal with it. The gamedesigner decides something and you make it as he said. The community manager decides what will implemented next based on user feedback and so on.
The other thing is I want to convince the others to make a MVP App release it and updating it frequently. But they want a nearly perfect design, some cool animations, pretty much every small feature which just takes a few hours to implement… What is better for a startup? (We are working less than 10 hours a week)
You need to write down an agreement about responsibilities. If you are going to decide everything, then you will spend a lot of time. But on the other hand, you need discuss the most strategic issues. Both things should be written down in the founders’ agreement.
If I were you, I would choose between you a person responsible for certain area, e.g. back-end or design. Then all others have to trust this person that he/she is going to prepare the best thing. Naturally, you need a leader, a kind of CEO, who can make a final decision.
Definetely, you have to convince your friends to let go all small details or perfect design. If you are going to be a startup, you need to act like one. It means many iterations and agile development. Otherswise, you will never launch a product.
You actually have two different questions that you pose:
1. How to organize a fairly informal startup? It sounds like your team has done fairly well self organizing. In a perfect world nothing more would be needed. But the reality is that businesses often need a bit more formal structure. You can’t afford to take the committee approach to every decision that needs to be made. You’ve named several roles that your teammates have settled into. That is great. But a person can not successfully execute the responsibilities of a role if they are not provided the authority to do so. Most startup success stories include a product owner. Who is the visionary? Who understands the needs of prospective customers? It sounds like this is the role that your team lacks most. As @SRDC stated, scrum is an solid flexible project development methodology that your team may want to look into. Scrum includes few distinct roles, but one of them is the product owner. In fact, the methodology places a fair bit of importance on having the product owner be a single individual, not a group. It should be person that has final say on what the product should and should not be.
2. Should your team adopt the MVP approach or something else? This question I believe is much more straightforward. The answer is that in almost all situations, yes you should take the MVP approach to developing your product.
I hope that helps!
Your team sounds like it could benefit from implementing at least some of the Scrum development model. The model is based around a flexible, 'self-organizing' team without a classical 'CEO' position, and progresses by completing small work packages to continually add functionality.
I've never used any software for it, or actually implemented 'classical scrum,' as I am not a software developer, but there are some good explanations at Wikipedia, and at Mountain Goat Software (not sure what they offer or if it's any good, but they have a good quick intro!).
Hope this helps!
You’re way too early in the game to be appealing to external “authority.” If the best startups are communities generating fun and profit, now is mainly about fun.
Put that another way, you need to find your own way to decide what kind of team you’re going to be. Think of key decisions as team tasks. They give you the opportunity to test ways of working, and to discover who’s “in” at what level.
It may be that what the others want is clear, single-headed leadership, and that’s where you want to step in. More likely, you’re running ahead of the group, and you may want to row back towards the centre.
I’m a fan of the MVP iteration path. But it’s not an answer to every situation. Maybe what you need to discover as a group is, can you make something really beautiful. If that’s the question, who cares what you should be doing?
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