Startup, Scaleup, Screwup.

11Fables and Reflections

Get together with your team for an Agile Retrospective to do some reflection and work on your Improvement Backlog.

 

We did it! A mere two days before the deadline, we secured exactly the amount of funding from the crowd that we had set as our target. What a relief! The entire funding round would have been rolled back if we had not achieved that amount. It made me wonder if the target had turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Would we also have achieved it just in time if we had set it 50 percent higher? Would people have invested more and would we have worked even harder if we had set it at € 1M? Either way, the Equity Crowdfunding was a success and it’s a funding approach I gladly recommend to my peers.

Our successful round of funding called for a moment of reflection with the entire team. I looked at the board full of colorful sticky notes while my teammates were organizing their feedback and improvement suggestions into clusters. The note that read, “Too many meetings” was grouped together with “I can’t get things done because of all the meetings.” I looked around for another group of notes that I was expecting. Ah, there it was. The stickies that said, “Not enough communication” and “More collaboration needed” had found each other in another cluster. They want to see each other less and work together more. Less sugar, more cookies. Brilliant. ...