Training and Mentoring in Unicorn Startups
PlusPlus' Challenge
PlusPlus is a platform for sharing organizational knowledge at scale, born and raised in Silicon Valley. Its creator Marko, co founded Marakana, a software training company later acquired by Twitter. At Twitter [University] he had the mission of helping engineering, sales and design teams to share knowledge between their peers. Marko approached Vinta to recreate the magic of peer learning for other organizations. He reached us to co-create the MVP of what is now PlusPlus.
Working together from day one
MVP development is one of our most sought out services. Here at Vinta, we understand the startup process and know how to adapt to its challenges. If the client needs the first version out quickly, we know how to successfully help them identifying which features are worth to invest time early on, and which can be left for later iterations.
Day to day communication is done through Slack, where we ask questions and provide real-time feedback on what is being done. We use Asana for project management, so the client always knows which features we are working on and what is on the staging server, ready to be reviewed. Our relationship with the client is very open, so we have a clear view of where the business is going. This allows us to adapt implementation and shift priorities very fluidly. Our design team is constantly collecting insights from learning managers, running discovery interviews, understanding where are the pain points and bringing intel on where we can deliver the most value to the user experience.
It's also worth noticing that our team managed to move masterfully around the 5-hours timezone difference between the client and us. We did it by having a very clear and updated backlog that allows developers to pick up new tasks in case we get stuck in a moment when we cannot get a quick answer.
On building and validating
In this project, the first challenge was to sum up the learnings from Twitter University, adapt them to a more general approach that would work for other companies, select the right set of features for an MVP, and test it with possible clients. With a first version out, we then started working on the new release that was focused on improving UI. At this point, we started using React to deliver a much more fluid interface and better UX.
When we're building an MVP, the client must have the final voice. Vinta's job is to help product owners identify and organize blocks of small features that a domain expert can look at and make the final call on how they should be prioritized. This process also involves a lot of adaptation: if we need something out quickly, the client must know which features may take longer to be done so they can decide whether it should be included in the first version. This process worked beautifully with Plusplus.
Results & Achievements
In this project, the first challenge was to sum up the learnings from Twitter University, adapt them to a more general approach that would work for other companies, select the right set of features for an MVP, and test it with possible clients. With a first version out, we then started working on the new release that was focused on improving UI. At this point, we started using React to deliver a much more fluid interface and better UX.
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