Seattle Startup Weekend

Not only are we debugging, but bugs are going back and forth from dev and test. Assuming you’re OK with the feature set being scalable, this project has a pretty good chance of being released. 

This will be my last post from the official startup weekend, although I’m happy to post followups as the mood strikes. Due to family commitments I must depart these hallowed halls. (I’ll be bringing home some uneaten pizza just to not burden Adobe’s garbage can any more than necessary). The attendance sheet has not gone around but let this be known I showed up on all 3 days, and my big accomplishment (besides learning) was to fix 1 bug involving a major scenario, with the help of Amy.

Seattle Startup alumns, please e-mail me if you want to keep in touch! egrigg9000@yahoo.com

Usually around here, this far north like Seattle is, one would have to be eating exceptionally early or in summertime to be having dinner with the sun… in this case, it’s Sun, and they have kindly provided a nice Thai-inspired meal. Not that I need it.

I purposely waited until others (like the Developers) who are far more worthy, pick up their meals before getting a small leftover something to eat myself. I usually eat only a fraction of what I’ve consumed here each day but there’s been such good food throughout, that it’s been tough to resist.

Thanks for being such awesome hunters and gatherers, guys!

For the benefit of the cities coming up after Seattle who are doing Startup Weekend:

* Consider doing a check on quantities for people signing up for a certain category, and adjusting those on the spot.

* Define the terms project management, product management, and program management for people, allowing them to change their role based on those descriptions.

* Recognize that by Sat am, certain natural leaders may have emerged from the different groups. Areas where I’ve called it out are dev and liaison to dev. These should be the people who inherit the program management role, and dictate to the project managers what degree of reporting will be reasonable for the team.

* Note that startup weekend is by definition a date driven release, so there is less of a need for detailed project management. You can’t lose tons of time here on a person being stuck, because the deadline is so immediate.

There was a funny story which I alluded to yesterday that I want to verify with you with this post. Previously, I claimed that all the program managers had been fired. According to Marina Martin, who was featured on the King 5 spot, on Friday night she observed huge numbers of program managers in the room, way out of proportion to the need, and if they were to do their job they would extinguish the role of the natural leaders. She checked with some other cities, brought back some definitions of the roles (program management, project management, product management) and the upshot is many people who signed up for program management ended up transitioning or going home. (If this was one of you, please write your story in the comments). The way Marina tells it, she did not personally “fire” all the program managers. That didn’t happen. So no matter how much of a cute story it would make, file that under fiction.

The word from the dev team to the rest of the company today, approx 3pm: “We are literally debugging.” This is accurate, from my perspective, although it does seem like quite a few links we are intending to flesh out won’t get their flesh today.

The folks in Bloomington, the next scheduled Startup Weekend event, are watching us closely, and for good reason. There is a lot to understand and learn from seeing what other cities are going through.

Pointing to the candor shared by Elizabeth,  one blogger there appropriately notes:

First, scuffles, huffs and hurt feelings are likely in any scenario where you put several dozen strangers in a room with a task and a deadline. Some weekends have fared better than others, but the universal generality at work is that Friday night is the mostly likely point during the 54-hour marathon for angst.

My personal assessment is that while this kind of thrashing is not a necessity, it is normal and not necessarily a bad thing. And if it’s expected, it means there doesn’t have to be a lot of angst over the messiness of the process.  From my comment to that post:

Anyone familiar with managing change knows there is a messy period and the best thing is to convey that this is normal and transient in nature. Things get better.

People who left here Friday night or early Saturday might have done so without realizing that their personal experience during that fraction of the weekend was not the overall experience that the rest of us have had.

In other words, Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing still fits.

There was a huddle in a different room for approx 45min. Word coming out of the huddle. They’ve figured out the relationship between users and profiles. The schema may update again, but it’ll only break certain pieces (not everyone). And we won’t have multiple groups. It’s unclear to me whether these are purely implementation decisions or if this means a reduction of requirements. Many people jumping the fence right now, the barrier between dev and marketing is fairly porous. Especially given the news cameras.

Right now I’m testing out search, as it was broken previously.

Did I spot it regarding the schema or not? As I was writing the “lemmings with lattes” post, there was a schema-inspired coup to the dev team and we’re now working off of the coup branch. I’m going to do a sync and see how far we’re away from alpha.

One simple fact about geeks and startups - we run on pizza. Pizza by Zeek’s and sponsored by University of Washington Technology Management MBA and arranged by graduate, Hans Omli. Thank you Hans!

While I’m at it, I owe Hans a correction and an apology. I was led to believe that yesterday’s cake was arranged by Hans (Shoestring Ventures) and sponsored by the Pirillos - apparently that was all Hans. You’re a champ, Hans and we all thank you. The cake was both beautiful and delicious!

While I’ve been working on building the list of skillbit ™ buzz, Sherry and I discovered that we have friends in common through my husband’s work and his Lawyerpalooza project. Too funny.

Now that we’re getting to know each other better, working relationships continue to improve and deepen. People are connecting up on LinkedIn and are learning how they know each other from different worlds.

Bob, with Saturday House has his project in SoDo, right near Cobalt Group, where several of us have ties.

Like a lot of folks who came to this event already knowing each other, Linda and I have a pre-existing connection.

If you’re a participant, or know any participants and are discovering small world connections, we want to know your story so make a comment!

So I learned something - wandering around picking up trash at different tables is not only helpful and apparently immensely appreciated, it also provides a great opportunity to hear what’s happening at each of the groups. Although it’s starting to get a bit late, there are definitely still people here, hard at work.

Picking up after people also warranted a “Thanks, Mom!” — Except… (to quote a favorite TV show from days gone by)… I’m not the mama!