On Processes

Week 4 of Founding Typogram

Greetings, friends!

The past week at Typogram has been significant. We had our product roadmap planning meeting! We spent 90 minutes talking about what we will build and ship in the next eight months and how we can coordinate all the effort and milestones together like a symphony.

In my past work experience, I have encountered people who were enthusiastic about processes and people who were the opposite. I fell into the former category and loved setting up processes. However, I sometimes find excessive processes could be counter-productive and take time away from doing the actual work. 

Having a recurring product roadmap meeting is, in my opinion, a very productive process. A startup like ours needs to plan ahead while being agile. Priority will shift, but first, we need a priority! Now that we have a roadmap to follow, we will charge ahead with full steam, check back in regularly, and make changes accordingly.

We also adjusted other processes that were already in place. We moved our weekly sprint meeting from Monday morning to Friday afternoon followed by “happy hour.” When I first proposed Monday, I thought having a sprint meeting was a great way to kick-start the week. It turned out we were both stressed out by that meeting, and having it on Monday hurt momentum. Moving it to be the last thing for Friday makes it light-hearted and something to look forward to. We also made changes to our daily standup. We will write down what we plan to accomplish that day in our “work log” and share it with each other standing up. This new process makes sure we are more prepared, and the standup is “snappier.”

Most of my process ideas came from experience working in tech corporate, but I understand there must be some differences between big corporate and startup. What are some processes that benefited your team? Please let me know!

Founders’ Besties

- a weekly listicle of helpful links for startup founders!

IndieGrow

Editor’s note: IndieGrow is a new project by my co-founder to help users grow their social media presence. I used to have a stale Twitter following because I don’t have a habit of tweeting regularly. Hua helped me by sending three threads to me to comment on every day. It works wonders to increase my Twitter engagement! She is now expanding it to be a free service for everyone! If you are like me, who doesn’t naturally have lots to say on Twitter, this is a great resource.

Map of Reddit

Link: https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/

Editor’s note: similar to last week’s recommendation redditlist.io, Map of Reddit provided a fun way for founders to find thriving communities on Reddit. I see Reddit as a great place to find potential customers because it is interest-based.

Work Log

Link: https://method.ac/writing/

Editor’s note: I have been following this work log on and off for 2 or 3 years. I always find something relatable in its writings, either a struggle that I was having or a feeling that I share, especially now as a founder.