Startup Outsourcing

Stay lean – and not only because the economy direction is difficult to predict, but also because it is in your interest, be you the contractor or the customer.

It’s no secret that the more startup can iterate with the given funding, the more successful it is. Yet this is not all you need to follow. You need to iterate wisely – features bringing most business values first.

True, this is what Scrum is about. However, when it comes to development, we tend to over-engineer, keep possible extensions in mind, building unnecessarily ‘flexible’ systems, etc. etc.

Don’t waste time. The more you waste, the less your chances to finish the iteration with the maximum business value by the end, and the more chances your runway will not be enough to take off.

Hey, I am not only appealing to developers. It also takes good approach from the customer to communicate the objectives clearly (and unambiguously). And yes, customer does need to pay the attention to what’s going on the project. And of course, developers need to make sure customer pays this attention.

Bottom-line is clear – make sure you only spend efforts on what delivers business value. For this make sure the objectives are laid out and comprehended perfectly well. Double-check, double-check, and double-check.

After all, wasting of efforts takes credit for “only” 90% of the project failures that I witnessed. Quite a risk to mitigate…