PocketSmith

So Jas and I had a talk…

It started with Jas telling me how what I do is awesome for a 23 years old French guy in New Zealand. Cool. But I don’t want people to think what I do is good because I am French and English is not my mother tongue. So I asked him “what do you think my job is within the team?”. I didn’t really liked the answer so I wouldn’t report it here ahah But anyway, the fact is it doesn’t seem to be clear what I do for the business. In order to give you an idea of what I do, let’s use the story in my previous post. I wrote down a comment that wasn’t representative of PocketSmith. So what is PocketSmith? How do we promote it outside? What words do we use to describe what we do? Answers to these questions could be found by having a group discussion focused on PR (Public Relations). Fact: Two weeks ago, I organized a PR meeting. James and Jas were too busy to bother. Too bad

This story illustrates perfectly what I am supposed to do: Put some structure around the business (sounds familiar? I am the one without the huge development load. I can focus on the big picture and:

• Keep an eye on our finances. Alert my partners if we need to re-capitalize the business. Make sure we can pay our bills on time (ok at the moment, it is pretty easy cause we don’t spend much
• Formalize our strategy to make sure we are all at the same page and we don’t miss any opportunity. My work provides a guideline for our startup.
• Do some researches of our competitive landscape, potential partners in New Zealand and overseas and press people to contact.
• Provide a structure to keep track of : Nb of PocketSmith users, Feedbacks sent, Bugs found… Basically I want the team to be able to find any information related to PocketSmith within a minute.
• Organize and update the “To Do List” (we use a free version of Basecamp) that Jas and James can rely on.
• …

There are a lot of problems associated with these missions. First of all, It is very “underground”. It is not as rewarding as developing a cool web app from scratch. Moreover, being a young Operations Manager for a tech startup is not an easy place to be in. Basically, I am trying to provide the structure to grow the business faster whereas we have adopted the “entrepreneurs mindset”. Working for a startup means having NO business structure and NO business processes. And that is what makes a startup attractive: flexibility. The challenge for me is then to find the right balance and take advantage of strenghts from both worlds.

In my mind, I am building a wall. If I fail to build strong fondations, the wall will collapse one day. I don’t want that to happen. Jas and James are my brothers. I got their back!

We are so busy now that we have to “stream” your work, i.e. keep working on things to do. James and Jas are even busier as they have to keep building the product and ensure its maintenance. My job is then to make sure we are not only reactive but proactive…I guess I have to stand up and Just Do It…

Tags: Business structure, Operations Management, pocketsmith, team

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 11:48 pm and is filed under Business structure, Ramblings, Startup tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.