Ask HN: How best to structure a "start-up" of 25 people

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=817504

by araneae • 17 years ago

2 3 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm in a software engineering class, and the class is being run like a start-up (theoretically). We have a customer, a summer camp that wants to move from a paper based sign-up for art classes to a more automated system.

Currently we have 4 people who volunteered to be managers, and about 20 other folks.

As a class we have to decide how to structure the teams. Since the product can be divided into 3 groups- teacher interface, student interface, and billing- the managers are considering dividing students into three groups.

However, to me this seems like a suck way to do it. I was wondering if any HNers have any ideas (or links) on how to structure a group of this size.

jedliu• 17 years ago

This seems to be a natural thing to do. What are the drawbacks that you see from this approach?

floozyspeak• 17 years ago

A 25 person startup is 22 people too many.

Actually the students would learn more if the class was broken down into 5 startups all competing for the customers work. This would give you 5 small tightly focused groups. Each would have to nominate a leader and or agree on a unified vision for their approach. Then fire the gun, BANG and get to work. Break out your roles, do yer thing, but most of all focus on that customer and learn about the problem.

The problem with one big class is that now you have to have 25 people agree on the vision/course of action, good luck, and you stir up the pot to get 4 folks or less to basically lead/do/all the work and or you ignore people that had good ideas but maybe not the best communication skills to bring/push those ideas to light.

Plus the customer suffers with just one vision. Why not produce 5 in a class, bounce around perspectives, ideals etc, and have people reflect on how their group performed- challenges, successes and weaknesses.

Sure the client sorta gets a taste of spec work startup style but the students can potentially learn more and feel like they have more skin in the game due to smaller groups.

The competitive edge makes it fun as well.

seasoup• 17 years ago

real startups have people working 16+ hours a day on the startup. This is a class, people will not work 16+ hours a day to get this out the door.

I do think you can take a similar approach, and break the groups up in to 7 groups of 3 to work on the initial design of the product an 1 group of 4 to present the various designs to the customer, have the customer choose one, then split the product up into roles.

4 managers, 3 visual designers, 3 user interface designers, 3 user researchers, 3 developers, 3 database experts, 3 QA people, and 3 back ups to take over the work that other people drop.

The people in roles should spend time working as a team on their part of the product and also interfacing with teams in the other roles. It will be quite a class that brings together all of those skill sets, but even if it is a programming class it would be good to get experience "working" in one of the other roles to get some perspective on what they do.

This is the way a large company works, though. Or at least a mid stage startup, not a new small startup. Good luck!

Ask HN: How best to structure a "start-up" of 25 people

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