I figured I could do them justice in the notes department. Except notes to me are so stale. Plus I have to write in a notepad for official notes, and that lends itself to interpretation of what was written more then comprehension of what was written. So I figured instead of taking notes, I’ll blog it.

The idea behind blogging my principles as a manager and what I do is two fold.

1. To keep a log of what I’m doing so I can come back later to evaluate its success, or lack thereof.
2. To open the floor to you all to give input on what else I can do, or what I may have missed, as well as other methods I can try.

I must admit I am a bit skeptical about doing it. I know there are a number of individuals from National Speed who read my blog, like, say, the CEO (hi George). So, in a way, at the same time I share my methods of management, I am helping George prepare for to review me.

With the posts that will follow this on how I go about managing gen y, keep in mind that I do work at a startup. While that doesn’t negate some of the ways I go about managing, it may certainly have an effect if you were to try to apply them in a corporation. I would venture to say that it’s almost a chicken and the egg situation. The culture of the company partially dictates how you manage, and how you manage can be used to change the culture of the company.

When Chad (the other co-founder of Profile360) and I started off on our product, we were given a strict deadline of autonomy: 2 months. That’s all we would get, but that’s all we needed. Now it was just a matter of making an outline of how we could get there.

2 months might strike some as fast for a full social network type site. But I personally like time crunches and speed. It’s part of why I like tech so much and why I have involved myself with projects that otherwise seem an impossible task. It gives you a great opportunity to come out on top, against the odds.

In these situations, however, the clock is ticking. Which means we need to be highly organized and involved. That meant we had to take a very organized approach. Before we created our timeline, as I saw it, 4 things absolutely needed to be done. We had to:

1. Define a vision
2. Set our drop dead date (our deadline)
3. Identify our milestones (prototype, closed beta, open beta, etc)
4. Set our goals and when they need to be achieved

With those things in mind, we could move on to our timeline. The method I used in the past is pretty simple.

Identify needs
No matter the project, you will have needs. Some needs are more “simple” like figuring out the product name and logo. Others are more complex like getting the tech specs done and figuring out your marketing plan. The best method in identifying needs is to create a list of needs. Put anything you might think is a need on the list. Don’t worry on whether or not it’s actually a need right now. The next step handles that.

Rank needs
Obviously, some needs are more important than others. After you have your list of needs, take some time to go through them and rank them in order of importance (priority). Is it more important for us to have our name decided or to have our technical specifications done? We chose technical specifications. It’s important to keep order in mind when making these decisions. In most cases, you have to have your tech-specs before you can have your prototype.

Create the timeline
Once we had a list of all our needs and their priority, we put together a timeline (wrote it on a whiteboard calendar that was easily viewable). Before adding all our needs, however, we added the 4 absolutes. We wrote the vision above our timeline, added our start date (as determined by the company), our drop-dead-date, and our milestones (design, prototype, closed beta, open beta). We also wrote our goals down to the right of the calendar. Once these were in place, we could properly plan our needs within those crucial points.

Because of my skills, I personally took it a step further and entered our entire timeline into microsoft project. It comes in quite handy when needing to manage a number of tasks with priorities and various needs needing to be met before another can begin. Using project is also nice when you need to figure out slack time or rush different parts due to delays.

With all that said, a timeline is a great guiding factor. But sometimes things happen that you don’t expect, as they did for us (boo!) and they do wonders to delay you.

(picture by thosearewolves)

Update: I always wanted to ask. What are methods you all have experienced? Methods you prefer? I’d love to hear as maybe I can integrate some aspects into my own process :)

You have Entrepreneurs and then you have Corpreneurs (sometimes referred to as Intrapreneurs). Fundamentally, the two people are one in the same. Both an Entrepreneur and a Corpreneur have that startup spirit, the driving passion, and the [sometimes] burden of constantly looking at the horizon or analyzing their idea. What it comes down to is, both people have the disorder that is entrepreneurship. When you break the foundation of Entrepreneurs and Corpreneurs apart, however, you get two very different circumstances.

An entrepreneur is someone who starts her own company. They usually secure their own funding, risking the 3 M’s (Mortage, Mastercard, and Marriage). If they happen to be lucky or well connected, they manage to get additional funding through angel investors or venture capitalists. For an entrepreneur, the company is theirs. They’re leading the charge. They sink or swim, and the equity they invest is by and large in the form of sweat.

Corpreneurship is a bit different. With Corpreneurship, you’re an entrepreneur within a corporation. There tends to be a constant struggle of the corpreneur for more freedom within the corporation. It’s kind of like chaining a lion right in front of his jungle. Many of the risks are removed in corpreneurship. The corporation pays you a salary that is better than you would be getting if you had started the company yourself, and your access to resources to turn the product or idea into a reality is often much greater.

Both Entrepreneurs and Corpreneurs have their place. While both grow to be different through circumstance, neither is better than the other. I say all this because I decided I’d start sharing a bit more. I am an entrepreneur by and by. There’s a lot of small scale startups or projects I’ve been involved with. But for almost a year now I’ve been working as a corpreneur (not that this makes me an expert in anyway). The projects I’ve been involved with are all internet properties (social network types). Thankfully the company I work for (CastleBranch) has created an environment that feels much like a startup when it come to the more corpreneurial projects (probably because the company started as a startup itself).

I am going to start sharing my “notes”. What I’ve learned, the struggles, and the processes / steps I take when it comes to marketing, launching products, design, and so forth. In future posts I hope to see people adding their thoughts on the steps taken, etc. and will certainly encourage it as those posts come. If any of you have any particular area you want me to focus on or think about when writing the posts, please let me know.