Work thoughts to clear my head

The theme of this year is ‘innovation under constraint’.

I wish I had a bigger. I wish had I more people on my team. I wish I had more time on my hands. I wish my boss is a bit more forthcoming with his thoughts.

Right. Me and a billion other people.

The ability to get a lot done with very little is a rare skill. Fantasy doesn’t help anyone. Some folks call it bootstrapping. Some call it being realistic. As I would sometimes say to the other 0.75 people on my team: there are a hundred other ways of ‘if only’. But this is what it is. These are the conditions and these are the goals. Let’s do it without fancy.

With that said, when things seem overwhelming, I’ve always found that it helps to untangle the facts of the situation.

The crux of the issue is how can we reach feature parity with the competition with fewer resources and less time?

Fact 1: we’re about 4-5 years late into the game (in tech years is like two decades). The sector is carved up between a few players, with the largest of them recently valued at 1.7 billion US$., with bulging wallets to match.

Fact 2: I actually can’t afford to buy a pencil.  The line item for office equipment in the budget is zero.

Fact 3: The Market leaders’ products are objectively bad. Badly designed, badly delivered, not at all effective. But when you can spend $50 million a year on sales and marketing and PR with the goal of generating enough buzz in 1-2 years to go public, that’s hardly a problem. You only need to mislead 100 million people once to puff up your valuation.

Fact 4: Our tech team is very experienced. We’ve spent an astonishingly low amount of money to build a tech platform that has function parity with the industry, though we’re still some distance away from delivering a compelling experience. The point is – while we’re behind the rest of the market eating dust, they’re nevertheless within view.

Fact 5: We’re not as attractive a destination as our competitors. Our average salary is about 80% of industry average. We don’t offer perks and benefits. Our competitors do. Our culture is less than collaborative due to organizational silos encouraged by individualized KPIs and project-based performance pay. Our office is moldy.

Basically, we’re that chubby dude with bad breath and acne and mushroom hair wearing a crusty t-shirt insisting to the girl of our dreams that we’re a paragon of sex and romance.

Playing catch up with this product with no budget and a team of 1.75 people is pure fantasy. The goal is not to reach the destination (and self-immolate in the process). We need more resources. To get more resources, we need to demonstrate a case for it.

In the next six months, I need to show that the value of the proposition is greater than the current business.