What I Learned From Planning “TheViennaProject09”
It was around the 14th of May 2009 when this crazy idea in my head wouldn’t stop bugging me. I must have had a lonely evening or something, as I sat down that day, registered a website and set-up a document on the collaborative writing platform writeboard.com. I basically posted a first brain-dump online, informed a couple of friends about it and received spare feedback. A few little ideas, some interest, but mostly the usual sceptism. Frankly, I didn’t expect much more. A lot of people have a lot of ideas, but only some really stay with them long enough to make it happen. It takes a lot of effort to think about someone else’s project or idea and provide essential, useful feedback on it. So, I figured, before taking up too much of everyone’s time, I rather go and start with it right away, not waiting on any more feedback.
I learned this from previous projects. If you want to make it happen, you need to do AN INSANE AMOUNT of work on your own, right at the beginning. The more you invest at the beginning, the faster you’ll be able to attract a potential team. I had no interest to invest money into this project, I wanted to see how far one would get without spending a single coin (excluding the domain) for marketing, management, technology and everything else required to make this happen. But, what makes people become interested in someone else’s idea, what makes them want to join it, and and what makes them invest all their free time to make the idea happen? Most of this is still a mystery to me, but here’s a rundown of the things that I think I’ve learned out of this:
(1) Don’t hire your friends and then find work for them, but hire somebody who is able to do exactly what you need and then do your very best to become sincere friends.
(2) Scale as you need. We started as a team of two, shortly had 3-4 people on the planning team, and quickly expanded with every new perspective that was added to the project. We tried to do as much work as possible with the amount of people working on the project, but I quickly learned that with every new person on the team, a whole new dimension opens up for the project.
(3) A bigger team needs sharper distinction between job functions. Make sure everyone knows exactly what you expect from them, and what you don’t expect because others are already working on it. There’s nothing more demotivating than knowing your work is partly done by somebody else, or is not tied to your person, abilities and skills and subsequently takes away the motivation of joining the team in the first place.
(4) Say “thank you” whenever somebody helps you. Even if you said it a thousand times before. Even if it was nothing, even if the person helping you was super happy doing it, still, make sure you thank them for their work. I tried my best to show everyone that their work was essential to the project, that I was incredible happy to have every single one of the team members on the team. I asked them to join the team because they were all, individually really really good at something, or had the perfect motivation to work on any given task, an ideal reason to have them on the team.
(5) Listen to every idea, discuss it, take it or leave it, but never do it the other way around. As the project became very serious, I received a dozen ideas from just about anyone involved with every meeting we had. This was great! But incredibly hard to deal with also. There’s so much ideas, but only so little time, budget, and not to be forgotten: compatibility with what I had in mind. Still, I knew I should listen to all of them, discuss them, and drop the ones which made no sense, but follow the ones which sound interesting. I found it very important to stay honest, and not just follow ideas just because I didn’t want anyone to become demotivated. When I dropped an idea, I tried explaining why, and I tried to have as much people agreeing with me on it. This made sure that I am not just “not getting it”, but actually make a clever decision, not an emotional one.
(6) Make sure everyone is within the same mindset. With all the ideas coming in, I noticed that with some people, the ideas were spot-on and totally amazed me, but with others, a lot of ideas were a little far out my border of possibilities and thoughts. I later noticed it was simply because they weren’t as much into the whole idea as I thought they were. I tried to focus on taking a lot of time and explaining, re-explaining, discussing and documenting the idea and everything important to the core of the project to make sure the whole team was on the same page and idea of what we are trying to accomplish.
(7) Give something back, as soon as you can. And: This “something” might be simpler than you think. I tried, a lot of times, to find something I can give back to those people who went out of their way and helped me with the project. In fact, it wasn’t money, material or free drinks people wanted, it was time I spent with them talking about their work, it was the option to decide freely, be their own manager of time and details and ring me up right away for every new idea they had. I tried to give back the credit by telling everyone else I know on and off the team, what the specific members of the team contributed, what they did for me and for the project. I think this was a big thing, I did not get tired of telling random people that this guy did that, without asking for anything in return, or that girl helped us with these contacts without anything in return, I just kept telling people about and gave those who invested their time the best of all salaries: reputation, respect and appreciation.
(8) Never be lazy. I invested endless amounts of hours into this project. I was tired, sick of working, and came home ready for bed as my buddys were still working on the story and expected me to join them. No matter what, if possible at any price, try to stay engaged, try to show them that you are willing to invest your last bit of time and motivation for this. This is an incredible motivator for most people. If they see and understand how much you are into this project, they don’t have the strange feeling of investing too much time for “nothing”, when others invest less. Be a hard worker, don’t expect it from your team though. If you show them clear and solid results of progress, they will catch up with you very quickly. This fascinated me a lot.
(9) Take the bullet, if needed. In some rare moments, there were the usual missunderstandings. Somebody said something and somebody else did not understand it, or forgot about it. This is a classic source of team troubles. I had this situation quite a bit, not always with the error on my side. If you find that the full disclosure of the situation, discussing it out in every details would demotivate the other person too much, you might want to consider taking the bullet for it and make clear that the fault has happened but it does not matter who did it, or at least, that you were partly involved on why I did go wrong in the first place. This helped a lot in discussions.
(10) Believe in more than you actually believe. I told the whole team about how I want to see a mobile phone company sponsor us with brand-new phones. This was on the third or fourth day, 2-3 months before I talked to T-Mobile. They laughed at me and called me a dreamer. I am used to this, and frankly, even I thought it’s merely a dream, again, not a thing that could actually become reality. So, as the days passed, I more and more thought this was impossible to do. But I told everyone about it, still, and made sure we even expected a company to sponsor us with new phones. I tried a first round of inquiries with Nokia and other companies, but it all ended in nothing. I then became really hooked on my initial belief and was quite sure there must be a way to get the phones. A week or two later, one of our team-members set up the lead to T-Mobile. I still didn’t believe their marketing department would “get” the idea. A meeting later, I was absolutely sure these folks know their business very well and are brave enough to try out something new, namely us. The constant belief in making this happen, helped a lot. It is a lot of luck, but I believed in more than I thought was possible - and it alles happend just like that.
This is everything for the first round of personal reviews about TheViennaProject. I am very tired already, so let’s close this up for today and continue as new things go through my head.
