When ceremonies are not enough

Today I am going to talk about a startup which was launched by two experienced entrepreneurs as a spinoff of a big out of home advertising organisation in Australia. The product was designed to help customers find bargains that were relevant to their tastes and in their area. In short, a solution that helps you find great deals around you.

The startup was launched in early 2012 and lost the support of its sponsors after an amazing one and a half years journey. Our team grow from two co-founders to a small team of around ten people. Somehow it was a real cross-functional team with the following responsibilities: CEO, CTO, Sales Director, Marketing Director, UX/UX designers frontend, backend and mobile engineers.

At that point, this was one of my early first Agile Journeys and I was working as a mobile engineer and Scrum Master. We had small, short iterations where everyone, even the CEO, joined plannings, standups, reviews and retrospectives. We were inviting our users to sessions to empathise with them and understand what were the things that they like and what we need to improve.

All in all, looked fine and we were working as an engaged team with a clear mission and vision to achieve but obviously, we missed something. Looking backwards my guess, and that is just my guess, we failed to validate our product-market fit and our business model. We expended thousands of Australian dollars in marketing campaigns that skyrocket our user base to more than a hundred thousand people.

We were all excited about the numbers but the traction was not there so the users went down as fast as they went up few before. There are plenty of learnings from this journey but the main one for me was that is not only about the ceremonies, engaged teams and so forth but about having the whole team as well laser focus on the customer, the real pain and gains and how to materialise that in a great product and a sustainable business model.

So, what is your experience with that? Have you been in a similar Agile Journey? What were the main takeaways from your journey? Please share in the comments below… 😃