Transitioning Engineering from Minimum Viable Product to Scale

The Impact Seat’s President Barbara Clarke and Director of Entrepreneurship Terence Craig recently co-hosted a webinar that explored investment strategies and tips for entrepreneurs. Terence’s technical experience and Barbara’s expertise as an investor who has funded more than 60 companies and 12 funds — made this an insightful session.

Did you know, on average, 49 percent of software projects fail due to underperformance?

Here are some of their tips for early-stage companies and entrepreneurs:

• Respect engineering momentum. Scrum and agile are key: Non-technical founders must recognize that small changes disrupt engineering momentum. With agile, the iterative development process that works by taking large projects and breaking them into smaller iterations with quality metrics, engineering can be interrupted on a regular schedule. Scrum is a software-specific process at the developer level that includes a scrum master that utilizes a two-week sprint to accomplish work, allowing changes to be introduced while not losing engineering productivity.
• Perfection is the enemy of good: CEOs must establish criteria for the MVP (minimum viable product), such as the security, quality, or level of bugs that you are willing to accept. Once those goals are achieved, ship the product. Zero bugs is not the goal, but rather achieving the criteria of the MVP is what matters most.
• Architectural engineer is a key hire: First, avoid these two common situations: A CEO who wants to fill the role of the product manager (PM) and doesn’t have the technical chops, or an engineer who can build a product but doesn’t have architectural experience or the ability to scale a product. Instead, bring in a part-time PM to develop the architectural stack and then hire other engineers, quality assurance professionals and a scrum master.

Listen to the webinar here

What other tips would you give to early-stage entrepreneurs and CEOs? Tweet us @ImpactSeat.

Originally published at https://www.impactseat.com on October 5, 2020.