such as Mr. Soares want to know when things are
going to be delivered and how much they’re going
to cost. “Adding a time-tracking dimension to both
project and task management became something
crucial for credibility and pro;tability,” he says. And
standardization can help an organization rapidly
scale up operations.
“;is is a large enough market to allow you
to think about your competition as only being
companies based in Brazil, but you need to build
for a global standard of competition,” says Luís
Guilherme Décourt, a partner with venture capital
;rm Monashees Capital, São Paulo, Brazil.
As project teams in Brazil become more globally
minded, higher project management standards
are being adopted, he says. “;e teams that are
doing better are learning faster and understanding
international standards of how to operate.”
PIVOT;FRIENDLY
Whether refocusing its product delivery in response
to user feedback or changing its business strategy,
nearly every startup will have to pivot somehow to
;nd success. ;at puts a premium on practitioners
who can help startup teams respond to sudden
strategic shifts.
;e startup world is “all about agile project
management and the minimum viable product
(MVP),” says Will Herrmann, a former project
manager at Accenture who is now head of ;nance
at Hassle in London. Hassle built an Internet
platform to connect customers with house cleaners.
Focusing on the MVP is a business and product
development strategy that involves building the
simplest possible functional version of a product,
releasing it and then adapting the product based
on the way it is received by consumers. MVP-oriented organizations have a highly iterative
project pipeline process that can maximize market responsiveness.
For example, Internet company Canva launched
in 2013 by releas-
ing its free suite of
web-based graphic
design tools and
templates, o;er-
ing semi-pro
designers the
ability to cre-
ate polished and
customized graph-
ics. ;e platform
attracted millions of
users. As the company
eyed a premium paid ver-
sion of the software as its next
project, it watched how users
interacted with the initial product
and what features they requested.
“;is made it easy to know what we
should build because there was already built-
in customer demand,” says Melanie Perkins,
CEO, Canva, Sydney, Australia. But establishing
requirements for the premium-level software proj-
ect wasn’t entirely obvious. “We had a lot of
requests [from users] and had to select the items
that lined up with our vision.”
After recognizing that some of its most active
users were social media marketers, Canva decided
to adapt the new product to the needs of those
users. It released its subscription-based product
“Canva for Work” in summer 2015.
Project managers can’t support every aspect of
building a healthy and innovative startup ecosystem—access to capital and executive mentoring,
for example. But they can maintain the focus and
discipline organizations need to build and tailor
their products for a fast-changing marketplace and
then scale those products globally. In cities around
the world competing with Silicon Valley for the
attention of angel investors, project managers could
prove the most valuable di;erentiating factor. PM
