My background
For the past five years, I've been working as a Product Manager at fast growing startups. During that time, I got first-hand experience with the many pro's and con's of the industry. Startup employees usually get excited by chances to grow quickly, solve interesting problems, work with innovative technology and experience a big sense of ownership for the problems and solutions they work on. At the same time, they can grow frustrated or demotivated by long "flexible" working hours in teams that never are quite fully staffed, an ever-growing amount of internal politics, inexperienced managers, lack of seeing the bigger picture and an environment where efforts to grow always win from efforts to solve existing problems.
Drawing from my experience and as an engineer turned product manager who likes to work on side projects during his spare time, I'm keen to explore solutions for those challenges. As side projects need a niche and my experience as a product manager, I'm planning to focus on the particular challenges for software organizations.
Challenges for software organizations at startups
Members of a software organization
Next, I want to zoom in on what I mean exactly when I use the words "software organizations" and define who's part of it. Let's start from the place where the software gets written, the two-pizza team as coined by Amazon1. Depending on the exact problem space or domain the team is responsible of, a software team can consists of a couple of engineers (front-end, back-end, machine learning etc.), a technical lead, software testers (manual and/or automation), a product manager and/or product owner, and potentially a designer, scrum master, analyst. A software team usually has a specific set of internal and external stakeholders (clients) it serves.
Usually the engineers in the cross-functional team report to the technical lead in the team. All other team members, including the technical lead, report to a functional lead that works across a group of multiple software teams. Depending on the organization size, they make up one or multiple layers of middle management.
At the top of the organization, there's the executive level made up of VP's, directors and C-level leaders of the company who set the overall strategy and run the company reporting to its owners.
Challenges for engineers at startups
Key challenges for engineers at startups often include:
- Not understanding how work contributes to the company strategy
- Big time pressure
- Lack of clearly defined processes
- Lots technical debt
- Lack of documentation
- Inexperienced management
- Understaffed teams
- etc.
Challenges for product managers at startups
Key challenges for product managers at startups often include:
- Unstable company priorities
- Different stakeholders with competing priorities
- Unclear domain ownership
- Big time pressure
- Non tech-savvy stakeholders
- Lack of documentation
- Lack of clearly defined processes
- Inexperienced management
- Understaffed teams
- etc.
Challenges for product and engineering leads at startups
Key challenges for product and engineering leads at startups often includes:
- Unstable company priorities
- Time pressure from executives
- Getting executive priority for infrastructural vs strategic projects
- Retention in their teams
- Meeting hiring targets to support scaling the organization
- Keeping a pulse of what's going in different teams
- Coordinating on cross-team initiatives
- etc.
Challenges for executives at startups
Key challenges for executives at startups often includes:
- Aligning on strategic decisions amongst each other
- Communicating a vision
- Ensuring the organization structure aligns well with the company vision
- Getting budgets approved from the board
- Retention of employees
- Hiring the right leaders
- etc.
Introducing Scrumpal
As you can read there's no shortage of valuable problems at software organizations in fast-growing startups. I'm very keen on exploring solutions to address some of those issues. The next question is how to deliver solutions in a way that they can be easily adopted by many organizations. For that I'd like to start from the most common approach/frameworks to organize work and collaboration at startups.
As Agile SCRUM is the most common way of organizing work and collaborating in software startups, I'm kicking of this new project under the name Scrumpal. My vision for Scrumpal is for it to hook into the common SCRUM rituals to help address key challenges for software organizations at startups.
I'm looking forward to share some of my more specific idea's with you in the following posts. In the meantime, if this article resonates with you, make sure to put your email on the waitlist or reach out to me via the contact form. I'd be very keen to hear your thoughts.
Top comments (0)