co-founderI’m the technical co-founder of a (to-be) service based start-up. Other two co-founders are non technical. And because of their very limited technical expertise, they often have difficulty understanding a tech decision. For example, the merits of using native over hybrid development frameworks and which works where.
How do I bridge this gap? Obviously, they don’t need enough expertise to start writing the app itself but enough knowledge about how an app actually works (what’s an SDK, APK etc.) so that they know why we are taking a decision when we are taking one.
Now most of the (Android) tutorials on the web are geared towards getting their audience towards developing an app. I couldn’t find a tutorial which served my purpose. Any ideas?
Your best hope is to encourage them to get curious on their own and start researching. Brains are very difficult things to push information into. They are designed for pulling information. As they start skimming resources they will find many that are no help at all, but hopefully they will find a few that help make everything make sense in terms they recognize. You are not likely to be able to recognize those resources for them.
If they don’t want to go on a date with Google and Wikipedia, an alternative might be to tell them, “Hey, I need you to handle the accounting/sales/(whatever they do) and I will handle the technical stuff. I trust you with the stuff I don’t understand, you are going to have to trust me.”
If you don’t feel comfortable making those decisions on your own, an additional tech partner may help. With any luck you could find someone who speaks both tech and business fluently and can translate.
I do this with many of the businesses I work with. I find myself saying stuff like, “Your website is like a house. In it you built a room with only one door. Now you want to put a bookshelf in front of that door.” Getting the right analogy can be tough, but if you get it right analogies may be your best bridge.
You wen’t into business with these folks who you knew were not experts, your the technical lead, so LEAD.. create a proper DOCUMENTED technical review that they can understand, put together the RIGHT reference materials etc. Pushing this off as THEIR responsibility is the very very typical response and complete and utter nonsense. If you can’t explain it to them properly, you have no business being in that role.
Side effects of using Hybrid tool we faced:
Few months ago my team was using Sencha Touch 2 for creating an app. When the app was almost ready and we were happy that we met the deadline, Google changed something in their API.
Since we were using hybrid mobile app framework (Sencha) we had no option but to wait for the reply and update from Sencha team. They took some time to update that and in that time period our app (almost) stop working.
By using hybrid tools you were limited to the framework and had no option if there’s something changed by Google or Apple and it’s not updated in framework + the code is not very easy to maintain.
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