From my impromptu startup experience during pandemics, I now understand what Steve Jobs meant by:” ‘Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
I always told myself that if I were a CEO or founder, I would do things differently with great leadership etc. Then, I got a chance to start up something that I was passionate enough to run as a business early 2020 right before COVID-19.
As an experienced program manager in multinational companies for decades, I created the following high level project time line to get started as usual.
- Find a group of people online with right persona to assume the role of stakeholders for empathy mapping in human centric design for the front end of application.
- Create a landing page and wireframes based on the meeting conclusion to conduct design research with the target customers to validate the prototype and its use case scenarios virtually. (Later, I found that some similar applications were out there using other technologies for telemedicine already.)
- Recruit a team of engineers to work remotely on the proposed solution for the backend process. From my experience, I calculated that the price tag for such an initiative could be hundreds of thousand dollars with a dozen people from different background.
- Alternatively, start the product development by working with partners in the ecosystem on “job to be done” as a Service platforms to come up with the first version of application by a smaller team remotely. Then, gradually dealt with technical debts to improve the application through incremental releases in the future.
Lessons Learned from this exercise, besides managing the product development, the most important role for me was to be a leader to get investment funding, to attract talents, and to be a marketing and communication evangelist to look for clients to sign-up virtually.
