A Single Article

Constructive Contribution

Since I can’t give away all the details about my day-to-day work on this site, I’m going to focus more on insight and advice from the startup scene in my writing. Hopefully this means more consistent updates than the last few months.

In a startup, it’s typical for ideas to be plentiful and resources to be limited. It’s also typical to have a lot of problems, as a company moves from scratch to (hopeful) success. This means that there will always be reasons to argue, and there will always be a need for solutions.

I have often seen someone in the middle of a discussion do nothing more than state existing problems, as if saying them out loud will somehow fix them. Stating problems doesn’t make them go away, nor does it encourage others to fix it. An example of doing so would be, “Our projects take too long to complete because we don’t have any task monitoring or follow-up in place.” It’s way more useful to propose solutions to existing problems. While people may be annoyed when they are reminded about the same problems they already deal with everyday, the same people are excited to hear about solutions that might put those problems to rest; after all, solutions are what people get paid for. An example would be, “Our projects take too long to complete because we don’t have any task monitoring or follow-up in place, but we can fix this by using project management software A and assigning someone to be product manager.”

Now this is already a huge improvement, but in the limited teams that are typical of startups, if you want to see problems actually get eliminated, you have to be willing to take this one step further and actually implement your own solutions, or at least find the right people to do so. Another example: “Our projects take too long to complete because we don’t have any task monitoring or follow-up in place, but we can fix this by using project management software A and assigning someone to be product manager. I’ll purchase an X-user license for this software and have CD’s for us by tomorrow so everyone can install it, and I propose that we start hiring for a new position of product manager; in the meantime, I can fill the position to get things rolling.” This is what separates constructive contribution from complaints, and I can say for certain that this attitude is what every startup needs.