My client helped to come up with a productized service idea. Without even knowing it.
Hey, fellow indie hackers 👋
I have been lurking for the last 4 years here 😅 excited that I can finally share a short story.
I'm a co-founder at apps development company and for the past 4 years, we've been helping startup founders launch products. But agency owners sooner or later come up with the idea that they need to change a business model from the service model to a product one. Our team isn't an exception, but as it turned out - we used to be bad at idea generation. Service minds, and that's it.
We even started the "build for equity development" thing. That's how we wanted to become a part of the startup community.
Back to the client and the idea.
Problem
The thing is that we help Great Question (YC W21) with product development. Since it was a breakneck ride to build and launch a product they were running product development processes but they were a little bit sloppy. They didn't have the answer to the question "What's going to be delivered this week?" or how much effort was being put into any project.
There were a lot of different boards with different priorities in asana, tasks weren't always properly estimated. It was hard to make any expectations and any planning turned into a stressful exercise. The fact that the team works in different time zones (the US, Australia, Ukraine) didn't make planning easier at all.
After they raised a seed round we thought that it was a perfect moment to clean up the processes before they start to scale.
Founders should always keep in mind that if they scale weak processes, they scale problems in there as well.
What we've changed
First things first we've eliminated redundant boards and created a single one for the development. There were defined columns with the "what to add" rules.
The next step was to create a personalized backlog care system or script. It describes how to:
- operate with a backlog
- prioritize tasks
- estimate tasks
- set a clear goal for a sprint
We've implemented weekly sprints as well.
Results
This grand cleaning allowed us to:
- cut planning more than in half (currently ~25 minutes per week for the team)
- understand who is doing what and when will finish
- always know what to do next
- get rid of unnecessary meetings without losing the team's effectiveness
- deliver more work
After that results we started thinking like: "well maybe there are some other founders who are struggling with backlog mess".
So we decided to give it a try and created Less Columns.
And now we are looking for founders who want to clean up processes but don't know where to start from. We'll create a personalized backlog care system for you and plan a product development together (at least 3 sprint plannings).
It'll cost you nothing. We are validating and want to be 100% sure that we could bring value.
If you're a solo maker or have a team and feel like you're drowning in an endless backlog we can help you for free. Please drop a comment if you're interested in or you can book a backlog optimization call here.
Any feedback about the landing page or idea would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
P.S. We're against premature optimization. Our goal is to help founders to ship products faster.
