What is creative strategy development?

What is the best way for a startup CEO to deal with a CTO who is inflexible about the product development strategy?

• Some general details: - We are building a financial planning software, and have a fully functional prototype build in Excel/VBA - this helped us develop and test key concepts in record short time. After demos to a few potential clients, we got overwhelmingly positive feedback and some were ready to prepay to be the first ones to use the software when it's developed. Challenge: 1. CTO now insists on taking indefinite time to build a superior product (basically, having no time constraints). Refuses to give any time estimates. 2. He insists that "agile" methodology must start from some basic steps, such as adding 3-4 inputs to the software and going back to the advisory board to ask for feedback, before 3-4 more are added. This is at the time when we already have fully built prototype and we know the main 40 inputs that MUST be in the product anyway. Key consideration: Timing: If we could have the product today - we could sell it already. From the business point of view we just can't afford to wait 1-2 years. The proposed alternative approach is to quickly put our prototype into a software and give it to our advisers and some first few clients to use and comment - this would be the better starting point for "agile" development, since lot of that work has already been done.The rest of the founding team fully agrees with this approach. The CTO is uncompromising at this point. The rest of the founders are non-tech, so we are looked down upon when it comes to any conversations about the product development. 1. Losing a CTO would slow us down + there is always a risk with a new key team member. 2. Keeping not fully-committed CTO could derail the business even faster. 3. Losing sight of the business and taking all the time in the world to build the perfect product will kill the momentum and probably the business as well.

• Answer:

  Things that you appear to agree on: You have a working prototype that is not ideal from an operations, quality, performance, maintainability, etc perspective Since customers like the functionality of the prototype, it is essentially an "executable specification" for what you need to build The minimum viable product has 40 specific features that are currently all in the prototype You want to use an "agile" methodology to develop your product Is this a correct summary? Are these all things that the CEO and the CTO agree on? Assuming you agree on all of these points, here is what you should do: If you don't already have one, get your team on an cloud-based, agile-friendly, browser-client collaborative development tool such as Pivotal Tracker or JIRA Agile If you don't already have them, write an agile user story for each of the 40 specific features that your MVP must have. These are all of the form, "As ____ I want the product to ____ so that I can _____." Put these all into Pivotal Tracker or JIRA Agile. For more complicated features and for inseparable groups of features, write a short "feature brief" document in Google Docs. This is a simple functional specification describing what the features do and why in more detail than a user story. You want your engineering team to be able to comment on these docs, and you want to be responsive to their comments, so put these in Google Drive, Sharepoint, or some other collaborative authoring environment. The purpose of steps #2 and #3 above was to separate your product spec from your prototype. Now you can hone the spec, and your dev team's understanding of the requirements, without committing to whether the refinements will be implemented in the prototype or in some new code base Arrange all of the 40 features into a single, priority-sorted list. Even if all of the features have to be in your MVP, you can probably think of dependencies and other reasons to implement certain of them before others. Put the most important features and the features that need to be done first, at the top of the list Let your engineers "cost" each feature. I am going to deviate from canonical "scrum" here to say, this means: they should estimate these costs in staff-days, not in "points." You care about time to market, not about complexity or iteration planning; "points" are meaningless in your scenario. The purpose of step #6 is to get both the CEO and the CTO out of their entrenched positions and into a space that can actually be discussed as a business and management task. The CTO is no longer talking about indefinite time; the CEO is no longer talking about shipping the prototype. Have an open and honest discussion between CEO and CTO, about these time estimates and the feature prioritization. Do you absolutely, positively need all 40 features to have a minimum viable product, or can they be staged? How much time are the engineers talking about, to build the product "properly"? What would accelerate development? What are the development risks? Can you establish contingency plans up front for the risks? Have another open and honest discussion about the state of the prototype. Sure, on the surface it appears to work, but what does the CTO believe your exposure is if you deploy it? Will it fail under load? Will it malfunction outside of narrow operating conditions? Will it be impossible to maintain? You, as CEO, need to make the call, based on the results of #8 and #9. You need to say, "Do it this way." Your decision is not a technical call, it is a business call, based on the best information available both from the market and from the CTO. If your CTO quits, the two of you are fundamentally incompatible; you made a call that the CTO can't live with.