Startup Weekend LA: Focusing On The Important Features Is The Key In Successful Product Development

Sorry for not writing.

It’s been a wind down mode from Startup Weekend LA. It was a very successful event: six projects got pretty close to out the door. I don’t know how many other projects are continuing their work, but the team I joined is exploring continuing our work. There will be more on that later.

One of the concepts that came out of the weekend is having literally only two and a half days of product development time makes you focus on two things:

• Being innovative in ways in using the other team members to get work done
• Focusing on features that are absolutely essential to getting the product out the door, and everything else was gravy

We were lucky — I had the framework from another site that I could use to build the idea, but most importantly we split up the tasks of what we had to do early on, and for a few of the features, we were able to delegate the work so no one person was absolutely getting killed. I had a small content editing tool and a primitive but effective framework so the other team members could add data to the site.

Additionally, we focused on what was going to get us out the door but using a form of Scrum development and listing all the features on yellow post-its on the wall. This allowed us the to prioritize — not formally, but you get the point — based on need of the feature for a proof of concept demo. This is different than product development for a real product, because you can fake some things in a demo (like administration screens are totally unnecessary if you have PHP MySql Admin, and can access the database directly).

The result? By 2 p.m. Sunday, we were tired, but we had enough of a site that we could demo, and even more importantly, a site that we could eventually turn into a production product for a short amount of time until we migrated it to a real platform. That was actually one of the discussions that we had: preparing to launch a site that we all knew was completely throw away code, but something that could be migrated to a better architected platform.

What are your startup stories? How did you effectively get sites out the door while focusing on just the essentials?

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