Purpose, Funding and Relevance when considering new projects or startups

Today I was reading this 10 questions to ask an interviewer to checkpoint my own hiring of candidates. Often I talk to candidates about purpose of my projects and how the project may be relevant for a candidate's experience. In some of the startup projects I had done within my BIG company, I had to think about the elevator steps to climb to ship the v1. In the context the funding in terms of number of heads and how the product ships to customers are important. However for a startup the funding is a more important area. I applied the same lens of purpose, funding, and relevance to the 10 questions from Mashable. And here is the list to consider. Mashable does a nice way of collecting the information from many folks in startup to provide more depth. Thanks Mashable!

Purpose

Get to know the why

What is one thing that must be done?

What is the problem you are trying to solve?

What are your founders' goals?

 

Funding

Get to know the feasibility

How funded are you? What is your runway?

When is your next financing round?

What is your exit strategy?

What is the sales strategy?

 

Relevance

Get to know the fit

How does your product apply to my role?

What is the focus for the next three months?

What is the culture and environment like?

What can I learn? What contribution can I make?

Engage the heart to inspire action

Yesterday I was chatting with a colleague of mine about our new project. We both quickly agreed on the why the project is important and what a difference we can make by delivering on this new project. We also immediately noted that there is some deep disbelief in the organization of 200+ people if we can and will deliver on this project. There are many factors that drive the disbelief: clarity, commitment, collaboration required, meaning, etc. We knew that there is a great opportunity next week to pitch the project to the team at large. And felt that it is important to use that opportunity very well to engage the team.

As we discussed further, we felt it is important to engage the hearts of the team members and not just mind. Often folks come looking for logical answers to satisfy the mind. That is just the first or the second layer. It is the heart that is the inner core that drives our emotional engagement that often drives unconscious behaviors. So it is important for leaders to strike a strong accord with the hearts of others to inspire action.

We both recalled watching Simon Sinek's Ted talk How Great Leaders Inspire Action. Simon says that inspired leaders communicate from the inside out sharing the 1) Why, 2) How, and 3) What, or what Simon calls the 'Golden Circle'. Simon takes a examples from individuals and organizations to illustrate his golden circle concept. For example, Apple used to say "we make computers" which is a 'what' statement. And their 'how' was "we make beautiful computers". However the core driver for this durable mission over many years has been the 'why' which is "Think Different. We challenge the status quo. We make different computers.". And indeed that 'why' has been a solid reason for Apple's transformation in the past 15+ years shifting from the erstwhile "Apple Computers" to "Apple Inc" producing blockbuster products on a repeat cadence. Simon's other examples include the story about Wright Brothers inventive success and Martin Luther King's long marches to more freedom.

It is fascinating to understand the context and how various individuals approach engagement. I strongly believe that we need passion, clarity in purpose, and persistent drive to create fantastic products. I also strongly believe that it is the same passion and purpose that can also engage people to collaborate and hence produce fantastic products. I had seen this work in my teams when I had repeatedly attempted to solidify the mission, create 6-8 word missions for my teams and continuously engage the hearts and minds of my team.

Coming to the story from yesterday. My colleague and I later ventured into our project leader's office and chatted with him more. We were delighted to know that he had conviction, belief and passion for our new problem. We were delighted that he wants to get us all engaged deeply. We shared our inputs about the people situation and indicated that we are glad to help in shaping the speech next week to engage the team at large. Next week will be a blast!

Values to guide in Project Leadership

In the past two decades of professional employment in the software industry, I had learnt a lot from working on various projects (mostly software projects in teams). I  hold three values and continued to invest in these: Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution. Besides the project related values, I also hold high regard for some personal values: Integrity, Honesty, and Initiative. Finally, I like people values of: Trust, Respect, and Appreciation. Today I will discuss just the values related to projects.

Briefly the project values are:

•  Innovation - bringing new ideas to life - both on problem solving and process engineering to create product value. Innovation does not mean just a big bang effort like creating the next big electronic gadget or building the next big software development tool, though those are the things that I help with. Also there are numerous occasions where small innovations are very useful as well. 
•  Collaboration - working with people cross boundaries and cross-teams to solve problems. Bringing ideas to life is a big task. Attempting to doing it alone is not easy and sometimes can be just plain boring. Instead working with teams can be fun and rewarding experience. And for this collaboration to work, it is important to listen, communicate, clarify, and engage in joint sessions to solve problems.
•  Execution - is the art and science of completing the project on time and on budget. No idea has value unless it has been shaped and delivered for users to experience it. Execution includes rigorous focus on nuts and bolts details to ensure all parts of the project progress well. The 99% perspiration happens here: budget and tracking schedules, fixing bugs iterations, testing, etc.

Most times, I value the Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution on an even keel. On occasions, I modify the order in which I want to exercise these values depending on the type of project I am working on. Most times it is clarifying the teams I work with. Though some people may find it hard to adjust when we change the project and accordingly I update the values. In those occasions I resort to repeat education within the team about the rationale.

For instance, over the past year, I was doing a startup project to develop a novel set of ideas to market that had the potential to change our business moving forward. The effort required a lot of focus on shaping the new ideas and refining it deeply. For this project the order I used was: Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution. Accordingly, we spent the first part of project schedule prototyping and defining the architecture. I formed teams and updated the teams 4 months later once we learnt more. I also found parts that I can borrow and reuse from elsewhere - hence I applied the collaboration aspects to discuss and leverage others solutions. The team also produced parts that are to be used by others; we delivered collaboratively to others. About half way thru the project I started emphasizing the Execution aspects more. Accordingly I focused the team on reduced times to deploy and test our software, improve customer feedback, fix bugs and reach zero bug bounce, etc. Net-net, the values did not change, the order helped us focus the efforts.

Three years back, I was asked to develop Windows Phone Application Store. There were several app stores in the market by 2010. So novelty was not high, but getting the store services out was definitely very important. And there was strong possibility to create small innovations along the way. The order I used was: Execution, Collaboration, and Innovation. Focusing on execution to build up a high quality app store with rapid progress to get the store for windows phones was critical. Certainly there were many teams to work with to reuse technology from. The team adopted collaboration as next step. Finally we found new ways to do things and new features (ex: build on Windows Azure, optimize app package for faster load, Personalized search for apps, etc.) with our focus on innovation. Net-net, I led three versions of the app store development using the same value priorities and helped us get the app store up and running well.

I had learnt that having a few values that I repeatedly use helps me focus in my work and lead the teams. I appreciate the guidance I received from many leaders I worked with for guiding me to develop and refine my values.