When you start to build your business it’s often hard to work out what you need in the first 3-6months. A good start is depicted in the diagram. I think in terms of what makes teams productive so Tech Stack is divided between Ops, Product & tech and Sales & Marketing. If you operate in a highly regulated market you could have for example regulatory reporting in the compliance vertical. I constantly aim to review our technology stack to continuously remove legacy.
The title comes from one of the TED talks about a photographer changing his style as a response to feedback over and over, and never accomplishing much. The talk’s theory is called the Helsinki bus stop theory as it was told in the context of going back and picking up another bus from the (Helsinki) bus stop and not reaching the destination.
Often investors prefer startups to change “buses” fast so the testable surface area of ideas increases. But as in the TED talk enduring the feedback and building on could be the best way.
This scientific paper is super depressing as it outlines arguments which sum up to the fact that we are facing inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction due to global warming. I think there is no point getting depressed but we need to acknowledge the facts of global warming and start addressing the inevitable adaptations our society will have to go through. No point discussing any more. We need to start acting now.
Where’s the team? Is it in house? Why is it remote? People are interested. They have a right to know. However, I am always interested to find out what’s behind the question.
My data sample is small and built from my experience as CTO and working on consulting projects. So I am biased. Nevertheless, I think once you find more about the person asking the question you can correlate their view fairly accurately to the perceived right answer.
If the person is a recruiter or a talent manager, commonly the view is that in house creates better team dynamics and creates more hiring work which people with local hiring experience are more comfortable with.
If the person is from a finance department, the outcome is diagonally different. The cost, time to market and scale play a big part as to what good looks like.
Is the person is a CEO or an investor, there is no given right answer usually as there is awareness that not one answer fits all situations. And usually the strategic decision about the team make up is taken considering many variables but primarily where can I hire the best people to grow my business fast.
Finally, if the person is an engineer, she or he won’t care. Why? Because engineers want to work with the best engineers, making location irrelevant.
Having managed teams of 2 people to 60+, I think what’s important is how one is organised, what processes are followed and how well work is documented and tracked.
Usually default opinion backing the in house teams option is hidden behind poor communication, undeveloped technology strategy, immature operating model and incomplete documentation (stories, roadmap, tests). Lack of any of above is not a good enough reason to pick any option. Don’t miss on top talent for being lazy.
The holiday period is always a good time to reflect on the year gone by, and to turn our minds to the future.
2018
We started in March 2018 with an idea that we had for a while: making debtor experience best it can be while making the collections process as efficient as it can be.
I won’t dwell too much on 2018, but what another fantastic year for our business! We developed the product and accompanying service and started executing go-to-market, hired the the team and secured a business incubator backing.
We also learnt a lot on the way. However the key lesson for us would be that hyperrealism is a friend.
2019
Taking leanings from 2018, we are looking at 2019 with clear focus on go-to-market, building a strong team and serving our customers.
There is a growing expectation that chatbots can be used for debt collection. The obvious low hanging fruit is for a chatbot to:
The benefits are:
Interestingly, the knowledge assets produced for the ecosystem of chatbots involved could become a game changer in the in the debt collection industry, and for Call Centre Operations teams internal fulfilment processes.
The conversational UX could be extended to include advice for customers such as how to manage a budget, find work…
On one hand cryptoassets are losing value but there are still fat margins to be made by providing trading infrastructure (eg exchanges) for people looking for a bit of fun.
The author of this article is taking a longer term view about crypto: Will people in 2030 buy goods, get mortgages or hold their pension pots in bitcoin, ethereum or ripple rather than central bank issued currencies? I doubt it. Existing private cryptocurrencies do not seriously threaten traditional monies because they are afflicted by multiple internal contradictions. They are hard to scale, are expensive to store, cumbersome to maintain, tricky for holders to liquidate, almost worthless in theory, and boxed in by their anonymity. And if newer cryptocurrencies ever emerge to solve these problems, that’s additional downside news for the value of existing ones.
The author of the Atlantic article argues: The proliferation of ratings systems doesn’t necessarily produce a better restaurant or hotel experience. Instead, it homogenizes the offerings, as people all go to the same top-rated establishments. Those places garner ever more reviews, bouncing them even farther up the list of results. Rather than a quality check, feedback here becomes a means to bland sameness.
After building online mortgages website and backend systems (integrated with top UK banks) using microservices (Azure, NodeJS, Mongo, React) for the new project I picked a less ambitius stack while leveraging teams know how (Azure, NodeJS, MySQL, templated HTML). This article captures my thinking:
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