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Octablog readers

Yesterday was the last day of Startup Weekend Israel, an event in which a large groups of would be entrepreneurs try to take an idea from concept to product over a single weekend.

As expected, the last day was the most chaotic. Business dev guys were still coming with new features and far-reaching ideas in the afternoon, user experience guys were constantly changing the interface requirements, marketing guys forced design changes and pushed minor features into the front and dev guys kept smiling and nodding as if everything is going to be alright.

The thing that struck me the most was how segregated all those groups seemed to be. During the last year and a half in which I’ve considered myself a full-time entrepreneur, I’ve worked very tightly with all aspects of the concept to product process. I’ve done business development, pitched marketing ideas, gained a lot of experience to complement intuition for user experience and of course increased my development expertise. This gave me a very balanced vantage point when considering how to proceed with development of a product and the business as I was seeing the big picture.

In the Startup Weekend (SUW for short from now) I came to realize how much of an advantage that approach gives in comparison to expertise phased development - A development cycle that goes through groups of people with homogeneous skill set. In such an approach, at each phase all product and business aspects are never considered.
How can a business development guy with no experience in user experience or design can make interface and layout related decisions? how can a designer make far-reaching implementation decisions with no knowledge on how it will implemented? how can a marketing guy decide to sacrifice user experience for improving seo efforts? how can the developers be implementors only and not be interested in making top-level decisions?

This kind of process takes place in large companies regularly, and is opposite to the startup ideals. A startup is molding a non-focused idea and identity into something tangible. It should be dynamic and adapting. Everybody should know everybody and have input when developing the idea. What I saw in the SUW is that a lot of people have entrepreneurship aspirations, but since they come from a larger company background they ultimate resort to what they are most familiar with.
Edit - After hearing some insights from people who worked in large companies, this kind of process doesn’t happen there either (I confess to not being familiar with the large company process). In a normal development process, representatives from all departments are involved in the decision making process.

Back to the last day, as we were nearing the end it was becoming clear to anyone that we weren’t going to put out a working product with minimal functionality, never mind all the fantastic (in theory) features business development and marketing kept coming up with, features were starting getting cut until we reached the core again at around 10pm. Obviously that was too late, and a non-working version with just a main page and some content pages were uploaded (http://www.tribiu.com).

So you’d understand how good ideas get off track easily in such an environment, take a look at the following concept design and compare it to the actual site -
This design was produced by my partner Adam in three hours last night at my request. I came back at the end of the second day and told him development was stuck at the design stage as they only finalized the logo at 9pm and there was no time left for actual product concept (by the way, this is no knock on the design guys. The entire decision making process was not productive to this environment and time table).

In my opinion this design has real tangibles (and is a tribute to my partner’s outstanding understanding of the web environment). It’s simple, very focused and visually attractive. Bear in mind its just a concept layout and not a polished final. I believed this design had a very good chance of becoming a working product during the one day left for development. However, marketing said you must have this and this in the homepage, and SEO said you must have content and design said we like the concept but not shapes or colors. Hello guys, do you realize you have just one day to finish this thing?

What I saw at SUW reminded me a lot of the lessons taught in the book ‘Good To Great’ (on which I wrote a post), which put much emphasis on developing the hedgehog mentality - focusing on your core business and ideas. Those ideals don’t just sound nice on paper, they provide much insight on how a good decision process should take place.

I did get a good deal of networking done over the weekend, and overall it was a very interesting experience. My partner Adam and I are considering organizing a similar event in a much smaller format with different guidelines that are more suited to a startup environment. More on that in the coming weeks.