The concept of iteration for startup founders
Small step for a person, big step for a startup
As an early stage startup founder, it’s likely you’ve heard about the iteration concept as part of the agile methodology. It’s also likely you found it an overhead to introduce a full-on project management framework at such an early day into your venture. And it could be that you’ve never thought of it outside of the software development management context. Let’s go over a couple of points where the concept of iteration can come in handy for the early stage startup founders.
Software development iterations
Even if you still don’t have mature project management processes in your organization, and probably not even the dedicated team members for introducing and leading it, your agile can actually boil down to the concept of iteration. Instead of planning which features need to be implemented in the next three months and then letting the team roam in the backlog and have more tasks in progress than done, adopt the idea of a mini project, a small batch of tasks that can be done in an easily perceivable time interval (a week or two), properly verified and confirmed (tested) and only than go ahead and give a go on the next tasks.
Market / customer feedback iterations
What essentially defines a startup is not what many people think: oh it’s a small company. A startup is an organization that operates with an extremely high level of uncertainty. By that I don’t mean when the bootstrapping founder’s gonna eat next time, but rather the whole concept of experiment, assumption, validation, fine tuning etc. The smaller the iteration, the more frequent the feedback. Imagine a zig-zag trajectory of somebody finding their way from A to B. The smaller the zigs and zags, the less walking they need to do in total.
Focus and anti-procrastination iterations
Most of the startup founders start as solo founders. This is an extremely overwhelming experience and many report the lack of focus, procrastination, burnout. Having your todo list on daily&weekly basis can significantly help achieve those longer term goals. Give yourself a well-defined, super short-term goal that you can achieve before any params (your startup related or not) change, so you can celebrate and move on.
And a premium addition to the iteration concept would be: accountability! If you get yourself a mastermind/accelerator group or a 1on1 coach/mentor, to help define the iteration goals and then account for the achieved results, the progress could be even faster and with less wasted time, energy and headspace. Get in touch with Canopy CxO in Residency Board to explore the options: https://linktr.ee/canopy_inresidence