Planning your Operations: A Short Guide for Start-Ups

When building a new product from scratch, it's easy (and some people would argue important) to go with the flow. You have a vision and hypothesis that needs to be validated. If you only have three clients, their priorities will naturally become your priorities. When a new opportunity appears, it could be life-changing to go after it. The moment where you have to chose between many different paths is arguably the most important moment of the journey of building a software product, which can define the next few years of a business: fast path to success or burning more and more cash on pivots and rebuilds.

"The moment where you have to choose between many different paths is arguably the most important moment of the journey of building a software product, which can define the next few years of a business: fast path to success or burning more and more cash on pivots and rebuilds"

Bruna Martins, Head of Product Operations @ 360D

In any stage of a business, it takes strong leadership and experience to decide what to prioritize, balancing what a company needs and what clients are asking for. There is a lot of advice out there about what to take into consideration in each stage, how to make decisions based on data and evidence, how to have one-of-a-kind insights into a market - but what I see happening more often than not are good leaders unable to follow this advice because they either don't have access to the information they need or are already too deep into a missed opportunity or wrong decision to do anything about it.

Planting the seed for long-term decision-making is crucial, but often overlooked. Here, I want to share some tactics to implement while planning your operations on the starting stage of a new product.

Enabling data-driven decisions

There is no question that leaders should leverage data as much as possible, but I have never given this advice without hearing back - where am I getting this data from? To be fair, a part of this is lack of creativity. Some leaders expect information to be given to them ready to be processed, which can be valid if you are in a more established organisation, but is not feasible in a low resources start-up. No one can surpass, though, the simply inexistence or inaccuracy of data.

You don't need to have the budget to hire a data engineer to start thinking about data. No one will have the perfect architecture from the start, but you can ensure non-negotiable components are always considered and planned for.

The default internal data sources are product usage, revenue and customer feedback - so where are you storing this information? Which are the key metrics of your current customer journey? How will you be able to dive deeper into specific data points and cross-check something if needed? "Someone will have it" is not a response! In a constantly changing environment, you can't guarantee something wasn't overlooked.

Managing resources

Be strategic about what you can leverage from other providers vs what you need to build from scratch. For example, if a part of your product might require an integraiton, you can start by using Zapier until the feature is validated - there is no need to build something if you don't know it will be valuable to your clients.

This is also valid for internal organization. For any type of company, there is nothing worse than having to disrupt existing work to implement a new system, platform or software. It involves planning, communication, training and close contact with all stakeholders in the first weeks after rollout to ensure everything is going as expected. This is usually tied to yearly contracts, which can be a financial strain for small companies and start-ups.

Before compromising to any type of resource, test it - but really test it. Choose one team member to work full-time on it for 1 to 3 months. Most providers will give you a free or discounted trial periods for this. Only after you are sure the platform is helpful and scalable, roll it out for the full team.

Creating strategic habits

In a start-up, strategic and operational are mixed and impossible to be fully separated. You might be talking to an investor in one hour and helping a client onboard on the next. The best way to ensure you are not losing sight on the future is to save time for it.

It might not be possible to make all decisions data-based from the start, but you can collect the data available and take a look weekly just in case. The urgent backlog might look so long that it's impossible to visualize anything after it, but a vision session might be what you need to have a great idea that ties it together.

When you know the elements that will be valuable for the future, starting to incorporate them into your routine is the best way to get started.

Last, but most important of all: do not let any of this get in your way. Plans are supposed to enable and direct, not curb in any way. Part of the fun in start-up world is the flexibility and ever-changing environment, you just have to make sure it doesn't swallow you and your team and prevent you from building something scalable and successful.