Thanks to our investment last year, we’re now a growing team, and the New Year was a perfect opportunity for us to bring representatives from all our teams together in Copenhagen for an intensive four-day workshop to progress our strategy and finalise our development plans towards the mid-year product launch.
The Copenhagen team was joined in our workshop space (Sofie’s house) by Rob, who flew in from Sydney, our Product Lead Stas from development partners 4ire Labs in Kiev and, for half a day, by board member and investor Torbjørn, who came to observe and made some fantastic contributions to our session on customer journeys. In true startup style we maximised the opportunity offered by limited budgets, Rob’s jetlag and Sofie’s early starts to stretch each day by starting hours before the sun came up.
With a wide spectrum of activities to cover, we kicked off the week with our Community and Commercial team, focusing on strategy for building our customer community through the ongoing product response testing, and reviewing alternative strategies for our core product launch in mid-18. Beyond that, we reviewed a shopping list of potential commercialisation opportunities in six countries, where we’ve been invited to participate in various ecosystem projects. We narrowed down the list, based on portability of solutions and feasibility, deciding to prioritise Ghana alongside a partnership opportunity in Rob’s region.
The second day saw us walking through customer journeys and identifying refinements to our offering, through our tried and tested capability approach. We then moved into technical discussions, working through integration, data structures, our existing products and technical capabilities on day 3, then building prioritised capability maps for our mid-year and end of year releases, based on customer needs, on day 4. We also had two team dinners, and frequent top-ups of essential brainpower fuel in the shape of coffee and cake.
That’s given us a roadmap for the next few sprints, which we’ll continue to refine in our next workshop in about 6 weeks’ time; just like our development approach, we’re building iteratively to ensure we benefit from customer inputs as our products evolve, while maintaining focus on core deliveries. We’re already planning the next workshop, and cake is in production…