Reality is not agile. Part 1: Startups

Today I was talking to Steven. He founded his startup in 2017 and ready to conquer the world. He created a proof of concept of his business software and as he was convinced it would be profitable, it was time to scale up. The plan was to grow from 1500 users to 150.000 users in a year and 500.000 in the next year.

Enthusiasm is great. And using Agile as well. Combining these two created a lot of power but our technology could not keep up. In order to succeed we needed a different approach.

Steven continued: I hired a great crew. All of them very experienced with customer journeys, user experience, software development, testing…the works. What we did not anticipate was what happened in the wild. We had 12 different personas and 40 scenarios that we would develop and test. But man, that was not nearly enough. So, we got…let's call it feedback. The software was faulty, incomplete, wonderful, rubbish, best ever…

We had a choice to make: do we go niche or go big? We could have chosen the path where we aim on the happy customers. But that was not my vision. The only way we could pull of to fulfill the incoming wishes is to have a way faster method of development, test and deploy. That's when we evaluated several low code platforms.

The reason why we ended up with Plant an app is actually the fact that we gave it a chance. On a conference for venture capital investment there was the CEO of Plant an app. As he was chief startup twice in his life, he knew what we were going through and said 'I know your issues and I actually have something that could be very helpful. I'll set up a call and we'll create a proof of concept. If you feel it is anything less than 100% fit, we delete the PoC. If it hits the mark, we proceed.' 

Now, my time is very valuable as I make long hours and still it seems not enough. But I believed him and that is how it all started. I had 2 senior developers in the call and one of them already had experienced a No code platform. He dismissed that one as it was too limited in its options. Plant an App said it was no code/low code/full code. From a marketing perspective it is rubbish as it sounds like a jack of all trades. But after the call we had to admit: it does all that. And some. Because the UI is very easy on the eye. That doesn't sound like much but it helps less innovative/techy employees onboarding the new tool.

So, how does a day like today look like?

In all honesty it is still crazy. But I am no longer worried that we lose control. All items on the back log can be realized one way or the other. And because we have different options, I can use different people. At first that was difficult as we did not have an overall architect that would do quality assurance of all expertises but now we have and things run faster than ever.