Newsletter 1: A Guide to Roadmaps
A guide to Roadmaps
Welcome to your Intake Guide
This newsletter contains everything you need to succeed with Intake. In working through the exercises found in these guides, you should keep your Intake & Roadmap handy. Below is a general overview to get you started, and then we will jump into exercises to help you with your Roadmap.
Our responsibility: before we get started, our job is to:
validate: support you with focus, validation, honesty and integrity.
guide: provide guidance on a sustainable path to success.
support: commit to supporting you on your chosen path.
Your responsibility: in addition to a commitment to starting up:
positive: a positive energy, with a solutions-based momentum.
resourceful: a lean mindset, with ownership of your success and failure.
coach-able: to learn from us and align your work to our guidance.
communication: you are clear in your communication & commitments.
These things, our responsibilities and yours, transcend our program, and extend to your participation within our ecosystem and throughout your continued future as entrepreneurs.
Intake is a 4 step process
To start with a strong foundation, we’ve created a 4-step Intake syllabus, shown in the screenshot below. This Newsletter is designed to support you with Modules 1 & 2.
Terminology Check-in
When building out your roadmap you’ll notice the following terms:
Definitions:
Mission & Vision: a vision is what drives your ideals for the world around you, and as a founder your mission is to work towards that vision.
Goal: a qualitative & quantitative piece of progress towards a milestone in your mission.
Challenge: something in the way of your goal, without any way around it.
Opportunity: a way to work with what you have to overcome this challenge
Risk: what will get in the way of your opportunity?
Also: what will get in the way of overcoming your challenge even if you did succeed in your opportunity?Actions: your list of to-dos to seize your Opportunity and alleviate your Risk.
Outcome: a quantitative outcome for each action or set-of-actions you complete. These are also known as metrics.
Bonus terms:
Blocker: used to describe anything beyond your control stopping any of the above items from resolving.
Iteration: startup projects work in chunks known as ‘iterations’. Work is iterated, and once ‘ready’, work is ‘shipped’ (shared with someone). It can be updated again in another iteration sometime in the future. Iterations are typically 2 weeks, but can be 1, 3, or 4 weeks.
Launch: this is a term to avoid. Waiting for something to be ready is a blocker; where we consider launches as processes covering the full release-to-acquisition-cycle over a larger span of time, not just one day.
Scope: the minimum work output needed to deliver a solution.
If you have any questions about any of these terms, or any others, take some time to research them online, and share any specific question by reach out to us.
Mission, Vision & Goals
Below we cover Mission, Vision and Goals, with a table of audited examples in each section for you to review— all samples are obfuscated for privacy.
1) Mission & Vision
A vision should inspire others to join your cause, it should share your philosophy, and paint a new future, it’s fantastic.
Look through this audit of Missions and Visions
Make sure your vision and mission aren’t goals! or Actions!Add your vision statement to your Roadmap’s description.
Having trouble? Ask yourself “why?” to help you find the inspiration behind your goals.
2) Goals
Look through this audit of Goals:
Make sure your goals are not opportunities, risks, actions, or outcomes.Write your Goal in your Roadmap.
Activity
Brainstorm 3-5 goals for your organization & assign them a score out of 3 for the following:
urgency
difficulty
qualitative or quantitative impact
energy or effort required
motivation
opportunity cost
if you have your own, add it too.
You can make up categories to rate that work for you too.
Based on your activity, how are you prioritizing your goals? For example, are you working on very difficult things that are not urgent, because you’re trying to solve. tough problem?
Or are you putting a lot of energy and effort in something that does not motivate you.
Review these with your team, advisor, or someone who is a great listener. Do it whenever you set new goals.
At the end of the day, you must be comfortable and honest with yourself as to why you’re pursuing a goal, and be able to clearly articulate your reasoning and justify its business sense.
Challenges
Challenges need healthy, objective prioritization.
A lot of times:
if it sounds hard.
if it’s something we need to do, but don’t immediately know how.
if it might seem challenging to us, personally.
if it’s something we can’t do, or do not have access to…
We are quick to label these things as challenges, and in a general sense, we would be right, they are challenging.
We push back against these things with other statements:
it sounds hard, though it’s doable
if we don’t know how, is there another approach we can run with?
am I getting in my own way of my businesses’ actual challenges?
if we don’t know how to build it, or don’t have the $, what can we do in parallel to grow the business instead of blocking?
Activities
Look through this audit of Challenges
& make sure your challenges are not Blockers.Complete the activity in the image below:
—
After completing this activity
In reflecting on the above, revisit your roadmap to adjust your challenge accordingly.
Review the ‘Challenge Takeaways’ table below, and write down how you’re going about each item in the table:
Remember to review the audit tables for each section: mission, goals, and challenges.
Each section has a link with feedback to your submissions, and an opportunity for you to learn from the feedback to your peers.
Here is the link to all Roadmap Reviews.
As you are investing your time and resources into building out your project, and in participating in our programs, you have the opportunity to leverage our experience and not-repeat founder mistakes.
Of course, there is room for failing forward, and learning along the way during each phase of your work. Please move at a healthy pace— remind yourself that starting up takes time, and that’s okay.
If you have any questions, send us an email, or attend an upcoming webinar session.
Useful resources
What is Agile by Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/agile
Project manage on Asana: https://asana.com/
A practical guide to technical specifications on Stackoverflow
A note from Vivian Shen:
Questions?
programs@parkdaleinnovates.org
On behalf of the Programs Team at Parkdale Centre
