Can you get to 50+ iterations in your software?
- You’ve solved a market problem and know there is a demand
- You probably plan mobile app, web app, backend server, some compliment micro-services to control backend data
- You might expect it to be on the market in 3 months, but most likely in 6-12 months
- You or your manager/investor has some goal to justify the development investment. Let’s say $1M in sales.
- Sounds simple, right?
Production is 1000x harder than initial version
- Continuous production process is 1000x harder than design. How much harder?
- You can be 99.98% certain that you need more than 1 iteration cycles to get to $1M in sales.
- Sir Tom Dyson took 5126 cycles. SpaceX seems to take 20-30 in spaceship development.
- Our research has shown that it takes at least 50-100 cycles to get to a stable system that generates profitable unit level sales.
- On average your window is 2 years, so there is no way you can get there if your cycles take 4 months.
Number of cycles to reach a production level
- 1-3 cycles of design to have generic idea what a user might really want.
- 4-8 cycles of design to build a process to deliver the value.
- 15-20 cycles to have a reasonable stable MVP version ie system proto.
- 50-100 cycles to reach a stable system that delivers all the processes defined in the service design and take you to $1M in sales.
- 1000+ cycles easily to take you to $10M+ in sales and to be able to serve all target market needs.
The real problem of software development
- Usually a project takes 100 cycles to reach any meaningful investment goal
- 24 month runway (720 days)
- 720 / 100 cycles = 7.2 days
- 360 / 50 cycles = 14.4 days
Too often results look like this
"In reality you should aim for 7-14 days cycles to guarantee you provide enough cycles to reach a goal. This is 2-3 cycles a month."
Panda Training
Revenue 0€ - €280k ARR in 12 months. Development efficiency score at 12.6
Done: Product architecture, process, development and chatbots
One of our clients, Panda Training, had no development resources or process at all. They had in the past spend hundreds of thousands in development that got no results.
We've helped Panda Training to build an lean enough process to development. Using backlog design, sprint cycles and aim for 50 - 100 sprint cycles until you'll reach the system stability
Even though the project is far from final, the system still needs loads of updates, there is a clear roadmap and base that is already generating revenue.
Who is this for? For Product Owners.
We all want to be proud of our work. You and your colleaques want to be proud of the product, design and code released. We want people to observe and be amazed by the discipline, and the orderliness, and the care of the way we work. We want other people to share that pride with us, because it entails trust!
You want to feel in control?
Do you see how the system should on component level in 2-3 years? Are you purely reacting in agile manner to requests from the stakeholders? Are professional way of software development is to have a vision and possible use cases that the system should do. Any changes required is fast and clear to complete when you have good solution architecture done and documented.
In addition, budget and capability requirements is only possible when you have clear roadmap and components needed. This is what backlog design provides you.
You want to build trust?
As a CEO, Product owner or a business manager, if your colleagues, employees and customers are proud of the way you work, then they trust you. If you are struggling when a problem is difficult, or because a deadline was unreasonable, they trust you when they see the discipline in your work.
You want to see results?
Perhaps you've been told to quickly build an MVP, be fast, hustle, be lean. In reality that is not what the developers are looking for, when they need clarity and discipline. The speed comes from your discipline of clear communication and priority to do the right things.
Let's say you want to prioritise quick access to market and then grow to some number of users. If you do not have discipline in validation, that growth is meaningless unless you have the product foundation solid. Tech debt will kill the maintainability of your code and you are not able to adapt when new market needs are discovered.
Now you may rightfully question my motives. After all, this page has an offer for a platform to run such process. Even though this is not the only part for the business success, I argue it is a critical so that the other efforts are not wasted. You will actually come to learn how collaborative product management will actually enhance every aspect of your business.
If you trying to...
- grow you business faster
- build trust
- have discipline in the craftmanship
- understand where the product stands
- communicate the development needs to your development team
- maintain accountability
- know who is working on what
- keep everything organised and documented
then this is for you!
Read about our Core Concept
You do not know what is wrong or how to make a system better unless you complete one iteration
Backlog design around sprint plans is critical to complete an iteration
Map sprints to complexity and value maps
Write complete and clear proper tasks
Here is the truth:
- 2-3 sprint cycles a month are possible with planned backlog design and solution architecture.
- Unfortunately, in many cases Productivity goes down due to poor architecture
- Your risk on development failure is increasing as the costs of developers are going through the roof.
- We are the best people dedicated to solving this problem for product owners at SMBs.
We've been there!
We have had the same challenges you have. We've been a startup developer, CTO, founded and failed, companies. We've been developers for more than 10 years, recently at Amazon inc. We've done startups and we've done global corporations.
- We have 30+ years of tech development and leadership
- 10 years in startup product leadership
- CTO roles in a few startups
- Architecture and engineering in Elisa plc and Amazon inc.
- AI business development in Nvidia programs.
We know product and development inside out
Steps to results
You should operate towards Design Validation
- Organization should not risk having an inadequate architecture or develop a system that is not affordable.
- Design validation must address the customer requirements & organization capabilities and constraints.
- Ideally, you know before development, if the system and project architecture is going to hold water.
- Running out of time or over-budget is simply not acceptable.
Step 1: Decompose based on volatility
Old way
The old way basically involves writing function requirements to the backlog. They occasionally prioritised, but most likely selected on a ad-hoc basis on weekly planning sessions.
Old result
This quite often leads to a bloated client system, where the business logic is handled in the mobile app or web app. Another result is chained functions. Overall this result leads to a system where changes take easily 2+ months.
New Way
Take in the request, analyse possible volatilities, create layered components that encapsulate the changes and control business logics. Functions are decomposed around the possibility of change.
New Result
You can test end-to-end, you have architecture that can be changed in 2-3 week cycles, you can better communicate the system to new developers.
Decomposing leads to containment of volatilities, which in the long term ensure changes to the business logics is faster and can be tested.
Step 2: Compose use cases from components
Old way
Write user stories or user cases that define the functionality that should happen.
Old result
This will result in different ways of understand how things should happen, and results in longer meetings where the expected system behavior is communicated. But not really documented.
New Way
Write system use cases that define the behaviour.
New Result
Document architecture automatically. Unlimited scalability with inhouse and offshoring. Clear communication of expected results from the system.
Requirements are by definition a description of the behavior. You get much better results out of development work.
Step 3: Write complete tasks not user stories
Old way
Writing tasks as user stories, and not giving larger context how it is developed and not clear definition of done.
Old result
Writing tasks as User stories are again focusing on communicating the functional need. In the best case you get functional system, but changes will become complex in time.
New Way
Invest into writing plain language description, include detailed needed on how it should work as a bigger system. Write definition of done and later demand someone to write a changelog
New Result
Fast tasks output, clear done status, and changelog documented
Your communication to what is expected will be much, much better. Improving moral, trust and control.
Step 4: Create sprints in advance to keep the momentum going
By compiling sprint goals, filling them will related tasks you will have clear momentum on remote environment. In addition, having a long term roadmap, and 1-2 next spring pre-planned gives clear context to product management.
Your options to reach this?
Option 1: Manage it yourself
Required: product and tech leads (200k), fill gaps w/ consultants (30k), tools and office (5k) churn costs 15% (25k), admin costs (20k).
Average costs: €280.000 annually
Note that is does not include any of the developers yet.
ROI: 4% - 15% (more if you can hire a superstar team)
It will be very challenging to properly do sensitivity analysis, continuous discovery or product architecture on all design, business and tech. You will fail, and hopefully learn, if you have never run the whole development process or managed large scale variable cases. Based on our research about 90% of the customer insight is not transferred to the produce. The skills needed are so specialised that you'll have hard time to recruit qualified people.
You'll propably end with Features Teams
Most teams end up building a role based process, where teams fill features defined by the product owner. Information is communicated with adhoc and unstructured manner. Rockstar teams can figure out a way to communicate together and lead product process "magically". However can your team do it?
Option 2: Work with Sprinthack.com
Required: Sprinthack Architects (23k), Collaboration tools (500), CEO own time (17k), integration & others (12k)
Total costs: €52.000 annually
ROI: 569% (Absolute Benefit Analysis)
We will work with you to deliver the fullstack product design, management and architecture. We have 30 years of industry knowledge shared and in use by our Product Architects. You get a clear process you can follow to build your product mechanism in the correct order. We provide our service on a fully remote online platform, where human architects work with you on demand, scaled by an AI.
You'll end up with a Empowered Teams, scaled by unlimited virtual experts
We provide a managed service to focus building a function based, rather than the roles based process. Your team truly focus on solving the defined requirements. You get the product engine to be faster and cheaper to run. Our core mission is to minimize human resources needed to build and maintain your product.
Again, who is this for?
Underneath the hood, what is Sprinthack? What is it really? Is it product consulting? Is it training program? Is it product management? Is it engineering consulting?
At the end of the day, the problem we solve is ebitda. Your earnings. We build a pipeline for you to build a product that builds profits.
We are for Entrepreneurs and CEOs who have an opportunity discovered, but are struggling to find a good way to run their product engine.
You usually have responsibilities of a Product Manager, and need help on building an efficient development strategy and tactics.
You might already have a product, but are stuffling to get engagement to the product. You are not meetings business targets. You think that hiring more developers will solve your problems.
Some of our clients
Panda Training
Revenue 0€ - €280k ARR in 12 months. Development efficiency score at 12.6
Done: Product architecture, process, development and chatbots
Quote:
"Panda Training got great interest through hackathons at the end of 2019, won a few of them with a service that was driven 100% manually by the employees-coaches. At this point we started to look for CTO type of a person or service.
We've been super happy. We get 2x ROI in 30 days, and currently are at 10x ROI. Early in the product-market-fit search, we really need to go from product feedback into an execution plan of how are we going to get this delivered to the customer today, this week, this month? Focus has to be in the speed of the experiments and execution. With Sprinthack we’ve done that and focused all in-house to sales & operations."
- Dima Syrotkin, CEO & co-founder
Fibo Sprinthack
Sprinthack bootstrapped from the scratch.
Organising the whole company and product to support scalable Human - AI platform. Development efficiency score at 2.6
Story:
Our own product build from nothing while remotely wondering how to organise product team due to Covid-19
Analysis Mode
Human-AI platform for bench scientists to run experiments
Build up the AI team and algoritm development
Story:
Still able to adapt to changed quickly on AI area that is really complex to predict. Team is super focused on solving problems for lab bench scientists with data analysis that usually takes 700 hours down to 4 hours. Already won multiple hackatons.
CloudBounce
20% increase in profit margin. Development efficiency score was 3.4
Improved server architecture to be able to optimised small monthly recurring revenue margins
Story:
CloudBounce is an industry leading automated music mastering platform. Product goal was to optimize server infrastructure and save on server costs. Second product goal was to build “AI” into the product, but we eventually recommended to defer from the mechanism as it was not really validated.
"1000 developers in your pocket"
Get rid of the stress on what and how to develop a service. You will have confidence to do product decisions in real-time and have a process that is adapting to team changes.
You will have a development funnel that helps you to communicate and understand the mechanism needed to product a desired output.
You will generate roughly 3x more entreprise value from the developers. In the range of $500.000 per average 3-5 person dev team
Features
Remote Product Management
Remote service to build a growth plan, specifications and user stories. Remove your uncertainties with Impact mapping and organise the whole development engine
On-Demand Architecture Management
Efficient tasks always include a design and solution architecture maps. This include Unit Case analysis, Technical architectures and Component testing
Hybrid Develoment Management
There is no real reason to hire full-time devs. Get automated resourcing.
High Bandwidth
Act Quickly: Each Sprinthack Architect will only take up to 15 simultanious customers
These features sourced from the market will cost you about €21.000 / mo
Sprinhack starts only at €1900/month and within a 12 months is worth €348.000* in value.
*see Absolute Benefit Analysis
You'll decide the starting date.
An average the above features would cost €250.000 annually. Hiring the Senior Software and Design Architects to organise everything will cost you more than €200.000 a year.
Remember, we offer these features with 1/10th of a full-time hire costs. An average you will get €348.000 value out of the process annually.
