tech operations Archives | Vision to Value

Starting a Tech Company for Non-Tech Co-Founders

October 26, 2019December 27, 2019
by Luis Gomes de Abreu

In 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote “Software is Eating the World” a think piece detailing how companies are increasingly software driven. Today, that statement is more true than ever before. Millions of businesses launch every year and they are more likely to be tech companies than at any other time in history.

While a “tech” company might use software to drive physical production and services, sell software as a service, or fit software solutions into any of a variety of other “flavors”, they are tech driven. This is true for giants ranging from Amazon to Google to Facebook. But, while tech companies are now becoming the norm, many founders and co-founders have no real idea that they are in or are building a tech company. While that might be intimidating or might push many entrepreneurs into waiting to launch their business, it’s also increasingly a norm.

Most Tech Companies Aren’t Started by Tech People

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com graduated with degrees in engineering and computer science. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, graduated with a degree in English. Airbnb was founded by two designers. The founder of Group and the founder of Pandora both have backgrounds in music. And, the founder of NerdWallet started the $500 million company after being laid off as a financial analyst. Millions of co-founders start tech companies, with no real idea of what a tech company is. But, that’s also the norm for many organizations, who are driven by people who excel at creating solutions, not at running or designing companies. In fact, 33% of S&P 500 CEOs graduate in engineering and 11% in business administration.

Running a Tech Company Requires a Shift in Mindset

Most non-tech co-founders launch a company and approach it from the perspective of a product. Your organization works to develop a minimum viable product and then bring it to market and focus on making sales. Tech companies don’t work this way. Instead, you have to treat development as an ongoing process. All business structure and operations have to be driven by long-term develop and continuous improvement.

It also changes how organizations operate, with operations, finance, customer service, sales, and HR very heavily tied into the same processes and value streams.

Making it Work

Your role in your organization will heavily depend on how many co-founders you have and what their roles are. If you’re going at it alone, it makes a lot of sense to partner with a technical person who can help bring your vision to life. If you already have a technical co-founder or don’t want one, your priorities should be building operational structure, hiring on technical people, and creating the foundations that will allow developers to build your product around that vision. In the early stages of a startup, your role has to be about getting people on board, pitching your product and vision, and creating a brand that sells your product. This will eventually include networking, pitching your product to funding, and possibly taking on a role like COO or CEO. While this will heavily depend on your organization, your role as a non-tech co-founder will be to ensure you understand how tech companies work, to support the structure enabling continuous growth, and to help the organization grow through bringing on skilled people, marketing, and earning funds.

Vision to Value is a deep dive into high-level operational structure for tech companies. With information on how to structure tech companies for continuous development and value delivery, Vision to Value is designed to help you build the foundations of a tech company.

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Why Tech Operations is Key for Startup Success

September 19, 2019December 26, 2019
by Luis Gomes de Abreu

Starting a new business is a step that takes time, planning, and preparation. With over 3 businesses launched every second, any new organization will face challenges, competition, and rapidly shifting markets. A large percentage of those new businesses are tech companies, and, unfortunately, most go on to fail. Navigating the complex waters of launching and scaling an organization requires having the right elements in place at the right time.

While there are dozens of factors contributing to long-term success, including timing and understanding your market, technical operations is one of the most crucial.

What are Tech Operations?

The value chain includes everything that is completed in order to produce value. Operations includes the structure, planning, and strategy behind that value chain, making up the strategy behind work completed. In tech organizations, this includes designing teams, processes, work methods, departments, communication channels, sales, marketing, and much more.

Business operations defines how and why people work, connecting work to goals, and creating defined channels, goals, and output for work. Operations can be responsible for such diverse initiatives as business intelligence, system administration (CRM, product development tooling), creating feedback loops between customer service and product development, and so on.

Why do Startups Need Operations?

Very-early startups don’t benefit a great deal from defining operations and structure. Instead, everything is typically performed by whoever can do it, whenever they can do it. Structured tech operations become crucial as you start to scale. Here, operations function as a sort of roadmap and structure, offering guidance and support as your organization grows.

Why is this necessary? Kickstarter projects are extremely common, but many go on to fail and never actually deliver. While reasons are diverse, most simply don’t have the resources or planning in place to handle meeting quality and volume demand continuously. Orders increase, server load increases, demand for new features increase, and demand on customer support increases – at the same time. If you don’t have structure, you simply won’t be able to meet these needs in an organized way and affordable way.

Operations is a structure that ensures you can, by defining how and why you will meet demand, putting processes into place to scale up without losing quality, and integrating tooling to ensure quality and output. Whether these include processes around hiring and onboarding new people, integrating business processes into tooling, or using automation is less important than having the structure there to begin with.

Getting Started with Tech Operations

Scaling a startup is very much about structuring tech operations and building sustainable foundations for the future. The Vision to Value Framework covers operations from a technical perspective, helping organizations design operations around the needs of design, development, and a virtual product. While operations should also include extensive team-design around individual products and output, Vision to Value offers high-level input for top-down operational design. This will be crucial as your organization begins to scale, because it ensures you know how, where, and in what direction your organization is working towards. Structuring operations for tech companies means shifting perspective to long-term development and delivery, with infrastructure to support continuous quality output. Vision to Value walks you through the important aspects of tech operations to help you make those decisions for your organization to better realize long-term value.

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What is Operations in Tech Companies?

September 11, 2019December 26, 2019
by Luis Gomes de Abreu

Today’s businesses are increasingly tech-oriented, selling not manufactured goods and products, but rather services and downloadable products through online platforms and apps. This shift in how goods are distributed is a natural one, as consumers increasingly seek out digital services, solutions, and information. It also necessitates a fundamental shift in how organizations approach tech operations.

At its most basic level, operations are defined as the framework designed to keep the company running and earning money. However, this framework and its pieces look significantly different in tech companies than in something more traditional, like a manufacturing plant. Understanding those differences can help you to build better tech operations, capable of supporting scaling organizations.

What’s Included in Tech Operations?

Tech operations are quite simply the framework (typically communication) behind running an organization. For most organizations, this includes support functions, value chain, and strategy. The specifics might vary from company to company but should likely be outlined in your business plan.

Systems – Systems include processes, communication channels, networks, and other means of connection. These can be as simple as establishing work processes, creating portals, creating knowledge bases, and so on but can be as complex as aligning overlapping departments, coordinating finance, HR, and customer service, documenting work, or managing external relationships.

People – People are the core of any tech company. The more software-oriented your company, the more people become your most valuable resource. People must be organized, given structure to work well, hired to meet strategy and goals, and trained to continue to meet the goals of the organization. Operations tackles questions like “who should be hired”, “how should people work”, “where should people work”, and even “what is work”.

Technology – Operations covers hardware and software tooling, helping to choose the items that facilitate work. This might include software tooling, it might include automation, and it might include items such as integrating work processes into tools and software.

Tech operations very much focuses on people and helping people to perform work. This isn’t always the case in other types of organizations. For example, manufacturing tends to focus more on product, product development, and transit.

Operations exist to enable businesses to function in a way that drives value for the customer and for the business. This means that operations are functions designed to allow businesses to perform work as usual, to optimize that work, to increase the value delivered to consumers, and to excel. Formal operations offer limited value in the very early stages of an organization, but become increasingly valuable and necessary as your organization grows. Establishing operates at an early stage means you’ll have the foundations to scale effectively and sustainably, because you have the framework in place to do so.

The Vision to Value Framework is one solution to implementing structure at this stage, because it approaches operations from the perspective of development and enabling people and technology. Paying attention to how software is developed, ongoing maintenance, and creating work processes capable of supporting innovation and rapid development is crucial. Vision to Value uses 5 pillars to support these operations; Vision and Strategic Plan, Work Management, Process Management, People and structure, and Data and Information Management.

This outlines a framework designed to support tech organizations as they scale, with the goal of creating a sustainable organization capable of delivering value to customers over the long-term,

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Vision to Value

Introducing Vision to Value

September 11, 2019October 29, 2019
by Luis Gomes de Abreu

Today’s entrepreneurial landscape is booming with new ideas, concepts, and technologies. Modern business owners have more options and opportunities than ever before. This leads to startling statistics like the United States Small Business Association estimating more than 600,000 new businesses are launched each year in the U.S. alone. Despite this landscape of opportunity, an average of half a million U.S. businesses closes every year, and those statistics likely mirror the global market, where more than 3 million new businesses launch each year.

At the same time, many of these businesses have more help in the form of seed funding, Angel programs and accelerators than ever before. Most have a minimum viable product, many have a great deal of happy customers, and many are driving a profit. What goes wrong?

Marc Andreeson published “Software is Eating the World” in the Wall Street Journal in 2011 and today, it couldn’t be more relevant. Companies ranging from Amazon to tiny gardening startups are primarily selling software, and some don’t even realize it. More organizations than ever before are now tech companies. Rather than modeling, producing, and selling a single iteration of a project, tech companies must create structure to invest in continuous development and ongoing product delivery.

Developing a Framework for Tech Organizations

In Vision to Value, tech entrepreneur Luis Gomes de Abreu shares his framework for building the structure and foundations to successfully grow a tech company. Based on more than 10 years of experience as COO at Amsterdam-based payrolling company Nmbrs, as well as several ventures with startups like Grappster, the book covers the foundations of tech operations.

Luis began his journey in 2008, as a software engineer. When the opportunity arose to develop a new payroll/HR application, he took it. With limited industry knowledge and no knowledge of operations, he and business partner, Michiel Chevalier, built a new company. Over time, it became clear that if Nmbrs were to grow, it needed a strong structure to drive and support growth. Luis’s responsibilities shifted into operations, where he took on operations, internal operations like onboarding and customer care as well as introducing Agile into the organization. He quickly discovered there were no real solutions that met the needs of his company. He frequently had to create new solutions, reinvent new ideas, and experiment to find the best solution to a problem. He and his organization built everything from the ground up. Nmbrs took the Agile approach of taking small steps, testing everything, and using trial and error to discover the best solutions.

Over time, Luis developed a repeatable, structured framework, which he could apply, tweak to get different results, and control to sustain the quality and speed of software delivery.

Today, Nmbrs serves thousands of customers, who together serve hundreds of thousands of employees. But not every venture has been as successful. Startups like Grappster and WallyLabs helped Luis understand what doesn’t work, giving him the experience to pinpoint problems and why companies fail.

As Luis continued to work in the industry, he rapidly discovered that most organizations don’t have the structure or framework to support growth. Startups are often fronted by people with great ideas, but little knowledge of operational structure, especially for tech companies. As he continued to expand his own business and to experiment with others, he decided to create the Vision to Value Framework for others to use.

The Vision to Value Framework

In Vision to Value, Luis introduces a framework designed to support scaling tech companies. The book compiles the experience and strategy of 10 years of experience at Nmbrs and other organizations, helping business owners to bridge the gap between startup and scaling.

Here, the book introduces an operational model, complete with information on implementation and its impact on the organization. The framework introduces 5 pillars, which Luis uses to support tech organizations.

Vision and Strategic Plan
Work Management
Process Management
People and structure
Data and Information Management

Each of the pillars are designed around operational elements Luis found to be essential in tech operations. They can be tweaked and focused on at different levels to achieve different results, but must be balanced to achieve quality output.

These pillars each link to 7 qualities or outputs, which function as objectives and desirable qualities. The framework is intended to allow organizations to produce these qualities, resulting in speed, happy customers, quality budgeting, and others.

The book also balances theoretical and practical information, sharing high-level ideas that must be implemented for your organization and specific technical strategy tips. This applies to designing structure, organizing teams, and structuring the operational model to support growth.

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Tag: tech operations

Starting a Tech Company for Non-Tech Co-Founders

Most Tech Companies Aren’t Started by Tech People

Running a Tech Company Requires a Shift in Mindset

Making it Work

Why Tech Operations is Key for Startup Success

What are Tech Operations?

Why do Startups Need Operations?

Getting Started with Tech Operations

What is Operations in Tech Companies?

What’s Included in Tech Operations?

Introducing Vision to Value

Developing a Framework for Tech Organizations

The Vision to Value Framework

Read the Book