Aaron Gerry: Stunna Shades -- Good for looks, not for Focus

This is an inside look into our growth as a company.  Along the way, we’ve learned some incredibly useful lessons (many that we thought we knew before), and discovering more as we go.

Stunna Shades: Good for looks, not for Focus

Time, time and time again, I am amazed how easily the minor bumps in the road can alter your workflow for the day. Constantly changing direction can be overwhelming and seriously hurts your productivity.

Early on with Zazu, it was easy to get distracted with the daily, here and now worries that kept coming up. What really helped us, as we learned, was to FOCUS.  At first, it was like trying to run in Boston while wearing stunna shades, at night -- we wanted to be able to keep our heads up, mapping out the best route, but instead found ourselves with our heads down trying to avoid each and every bump and hole in the road.

We had to reevaluate our approach so we could concentrate our scope of vision towards the path in front of us. Ultimately, we traded the sweet shades for a pair of blinders and started by focusing on the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). By talking with a great number of (potential) customers, we were able to define our MVP and the feature list that entails.  With our vision set on a clear goal, we knew what steps to take and which to avoid.

From here we outlined our route, breaking down the monthly goals into weekly tasks and ultimately into daily to-do’s. To make sure we are staying on point, we have a morning catch-up session every few days to discuss our progress with each other. More specifically, our steps forward are now defined by our weekly release cycle. We release every Thursday, and we make damn sure we focus on the weeks objectives to get the version out on time.  This helps us prioritize and ignore much of the rest.

Stunna Shades: useless since 2006!

There are still potholes, but we now run around them rather than focusing on them. When something comes up, we ask questions to the rest of the team to see if it is part of our MVP.  This makes it extraordinarily easy to prioritize the must-do’s and remain on point:

Z: “Does this feature fall in the scope of our MVP?”

A: “Nope. I’ll throw it in the icebox and save it for when we move onto our next version.”

Z: “Is this bug going to blow up the World?”

U: “Not exactly, but it needs to get fixed because we are getting a ton of complaints. Add it to next week’s release.”

In the beginning, we were getting so much feedback and hearing many divergent opinions, it was easy to question our direction or what needed to be accomplished ASAP.  Now that we are focused on developing our MVP, the road has been much smoother. 

Aaron Gerry is the Resident Buyologist at Zazu, the Smartest Damn Alarm Clock.  Aaron is also the President of theEntrepreneurs Club at Northeastern University and is passionate about supporting the entrepreneurial ecosystem at NU and in Boston/Cambridge.  He also enjoys hot sauce and zombie movies.  You can follow him on twitter@AaronGerry