Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

What do you say?

One for the low fuel LED!

You are never too busy to refuel your car. Fortunately there is a low fuel indicator in your car. However in a start-up, there are no such clear indicators. You may end up facing an unexpected halt in your journey if you fail to observe any of the following key indicators. You may be too busy to look at these blinking LEDs, but keep an eye on these indicators before they halt or delay your journey unexpectedly.

Hiring delays

Imagine a situation when your start-up has bagged new customer orders. Your initial product has got good response in the market. There is some budget to get couple of guys on board, but you and your team members are fully overloaded with work. You should utilize this opportunity at the earliest. Plan to get some good guys on board. Most of the rock-star performers (including you) are solo contributors and get scared with the idea of assigning a crucial piece of task to someone new. They don't trust anyone to do the critical job. Some of them are just too busy to lead the lengthy hiring process. Yes, the hiring process is a tedious one and often leaves one frustrated. But there is no substitute to this method. To grow, you will need to increase the team size. Delegate your work to someone, prepare your back-up and most importantly trust other people. Get out of this hiring fear before you loose the opportunity. 

The hiring process should be kicked-off immediately. You should always be in the hiring mode and keep looking for good candidates. Unless you prepare to grow, the chances are bleak that your dream of growth will ever succeed.

Too busy for team meeting

Imagine another situation, you have got a team of talented people to complete the project in the limited time and resource. Every one is super motivated enough to work sincerely. There is no need of micro-managing your team. Moreover, you are too busy running from one customer/investor meeting to another to develop strategy or meet new customers. In all this frenzy, it is easy to assume that the work keeps going on even without a sync-up. Obviously, everyone understands the need of the hour and is capable of handling it.

It is a fatal assumption that can derail your growth prospects. A regular, may be weekly or monthly, sync-up is needed within as well as across the teams. In the fast changing dynamics of a start-up, things change frequently, priorities are revised and expectations are redefined. Develop and maintain a mechanism to have regular sync-ups at all levels to ensure an aligned growth. Without clear direction all your efforts may go waste.

Overlooking quality & documentation

Finding critical bugs in a product requires testing hundreds of test conditions. Every bug fixing triggers another round of testing. In most of the cases, up to 40% of the product development time goes into quality control. Apart from allocating time in your product launch plan, you need to allocate some budget for test set-ups, bug tracking tool and dedicated testing team. In a cash starved start-up, this budget is very hard to justify. However, you can not afford to have unhappy customers. Setting up a separate quality process, bug tracking tool and testing team go long way in securing satisfied customers. To start with, define a minimum quality guidelines and adhere to these guidelines.

Apart from bug tracking and quality guidelines, documentation is another way to improve quality of your process and products. In a rush of creating MVP, documentation is generally overlooked. As the product evolves, some pieces of code/features just stick with the design because no body remembers the logic behind it. The small piece of code written for a quick PoC soon becomes a messy architecture with several loop holes. Testing such product becomes a mammoth task. The testing and development iterations keep delaying the product launch and ultimately you end up having frustration across all the teams. It is very important to maintain proper documentation at all the stages.

Postponing unproductive chores

Having sufficient support staff is a luxury that generally no start-up can afford, at least in the initial days. While you are assigned to develop a critical product, you also need to worry about several other unproductive chores. Setting up networking, fixing wiring/networking issues, paying bills, collecting payments, clearing bills, buying office stationary/furniture/grocery, maintaining lab, buying tools, book keeping, scheduling interviews, appraisal etc. The list is quite long. Your to-do list of unproductive chores have the tendency to getting filled very fast. You are over qualified to do most of these tasks. However, there is no way to keep pushing them under the carpet.

The best way to handle these unproductive tasks are to clear them regularly. Keep you desk uncluttered. Never let those unnecessary bills piled up on your desk. Find a slot in your schedule to complete these tasks on frequent days. Delegating these tasks to your team is another way to share burden as well as responsibility.

Ultimately it doesn't matter what car you drive or where do you want to reach, you can't keep ignoring that blinking low fuel LED...

*Image courtesy of supakitmod at FreeDigitalPhotos.net