We are officially past the tenth post of our new startup execution series. Let's quickly recap the series before digging in to creating your startup's execution outline.
- This is what startup execution means in 2015
- Defining the 3 processes of getting it done on day 1 of your startup
- Startup strategy process: solve a problem, create new value
- Startup execution: 3 observations about successful consumer tech plays
- Startup execution: how to find your initial customers
- Startup execution: how to outline your market opportunity
- Startup execution: step 1 of designing your minimum viable product
- Startup execution: 4 etiquette rules
- Startup execution: why we play the game
- Startup execution: time is money
Remembering back to the last few posts, we should now have a list of user stories outlined with values - 1 through 5, 5 being most valuable - associated for the importance of the user story to our initial customers. For this next step, creating our execution outline, we must also keep in the back of our mind the 35-hour rule from the last post.
Your startup's execution outline is going to be the first step in tying together your strategy process - the initial set of user stories that aim to solve your customers problem - and the people and operations processes. Here is a link to an example template for you to look at, it is a publicly shared Google spreadsheet.
The columns required for your startup execution outline are:
- User story - a specific use case designed from the perspective of the end user.
- Customer value - the value of the user story according to the customer.
- Features - the functionality in the product that achieves the outcome of the user story for the customer.
- Build requirements - the actions and skills required to execute the features.
- Directly responsible individual - a term coined by Apple to assign responsibility for specific tasks on a project.
- Time to execute - time it will take to complete the build.
As you can see from the spreadsheet, by filling out the subsequent fields tied to a user story you begin to get an idea of the smaller action items required to truly execute the build of your minimum viable product. What specific features are required to achieve the outcome of the user story? What skills are required to execute specific features? Who has the required skills and will be responsible for specific steps to build a feature? And how long will it take the DRI to execute?
In the example spreadsheet, you'll see our imaginary startup (an on-demand ice cream delivery service) has a CTO (Sally) and a designer (Debra). But they don't have a frontend UI developer. Additionally, they want their service to be both web and mobile, so the frontend design and development must be both mobile and web. Already, their outline is forcing them to begin to confront an aspect of the people process - who can execute our UI/frontend - and the operations process - what skills do they need and how long will it take this person?
I am always amazed by how many startups have 1-2 year projections but have no clue on the day to day activities that are required to drive their KPIs. This outline forces you to think of your daily operating metrics first, which will give you a real idea of what can be achieved in a day and a week, which will enable you to put together a real long term budget and plan.
One last note on the startup execution outline. This tool is not to take the place SCRUM and the software used to manage it, like Trello. This is a complement to SCRUM, mostly for the startup CEO and any managers/founders, to be able to organize in one place their strategy, people and operations processes. This document can be used for much more than product development, which we will explore in the future.
In our next post, we will begin to dive in to the people process for their company, as they need to get some new folks in order to execute their idea now that their initial strategy is set.
