12 things I learned from Building Digital Ventures

Sharing some of the things I learned from building out new ventures as part of the co-founding leadership team

I have been fortunate to have been in the leadership team founding 2 Digital Bank Ventures. These are the 12 things I learned from this experience:

1) Reaching the goal is not a straight line. Be prepared for lots of bumps and challenges along the way.

2)Launch MVP(Minimal Viable Product) to find Product-Market fit (is this product really solving problems for customers)

3) The Risk of the Product reduces the closer it gets to shipment to customers. The more opportunity you have to iterate a version of the product with real customers the better the outcome.

4) Don’t go overboard with Agile! You need to have a high-level plan which roughly lays down the key milestones and then let the agile teams work through the details.

5) Small Motivated Teams are better than large complex teams. 2 Pizza team of 8 people is a good benchmark.

6) Manage dependencies between different as teams grow. Important to keep the focus on what each team is doing and what their part is in slicing the elephant

7) Develop a Test & Learn approach to building the product. Don’t assume you know what customers want and what works. Iterate through the prototype, get feedback & improve.

8) Test Product-Market fit with users. Make this a data & metric drive process, not just something based on gutfeel. e.g. what % of users would be disappointed if the product is removed from the appstore.

9)Release the updates to the product often to make it a simple process and build the muscle to deploy quickly.

10) Alignment across teams and stakeholders is not that obvious

11) Take time to be more effective. Not be too busy to improve the productivity of what you are doing as you build

12) Last but not the least… Work Hard, Have fun, Make history!!!

A special shoutout to I wanted to thank Henrik Kniberg @henrikkniberg whose amazing images have helped me explain some of the complex learnings I wanted to share. More of information and learnings on his site https://www.crisp.se/konsulter/henrik-kniberg