The 5-Minute Startup CTO #5

Team radar, Backups, Customer advisory board

Here are your picks for this week:

It’s all about People

Regular retrospectives are a healthy practice for any team’s continual improvement. A pretty wide array of techniques exist to facilitate these retrospectives, and this good article goes some length into detailing one, the Team Radar, especially aimed at enabling a team to self-diagnose and solve issues.

Lesson learnt

Backups are such a basic, mundane topic that they hardly feel worth mentioning. Which may be an issue in itself! So it is a good reminder to read how Pixar nearly lost millions of $ of work while working on Toy Story 2.

“Pixar, at the time, did not continuously test their backups. This is where the trouble started”

So even in the early, ‘survival mode’ stages of a startup, just make sure that appropriate measures are in place, and that backups are regularly checked.

Something to try

Having a Customer Advisory Board can be a really useful weapon in the battle to find and maintain product-market fit. You don’t need to reach huge levels of revenue to put a CAB in place, and the benefits should be worthwhile!

I hope you enjoyed this. Have a great week

Fabrice

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The 5-Minute Startup CTO: 3 top insights in 5 minutes, every week, for startup CTOs and Tech Leads. Hand-picked by Fabrice, a consulting CTO. Let me know if you need help with your startup!