Last week I shared that I’ve been building SchoolsOut.ae, a clubs directory for Abu Dhabi parents, with a friend. One reason I wanted to do this was to get first-hand experience of the full product lifecycle in a startup context. We’re only just live, and I’m already surprised by what I’ve learned.
The biggest one: in the corporate world, we sell agile as the antidote to too much process, too much structure, too many decisions made too early. A startup has none of those problems. So does agile even help?
Turns out, yes, just not for the reason I expected. Agile is also the antidote to chaos. The discipline gives you just enough structure and planning that you’re not drifting, without needing a heavy process to get there. A light cadence to keep everyone in sync is enough. Kanban can work, but I’ve found Scrum works better as a forcing function when there isn’t dedicated capacity.
Two other things stood out. Design thinking has infinite paths through it, and the skill isn’t covering all of them, it’s being specific about what you don’t know and choosing the shortest route to learning it. A simple to-be user journey, done on paper, surfaced gaps in a product we’d been talking about for months. The same discipline applied to personas, grounding them in actual research, not just opinion, was something we grappled with.
And getting out of your own head matters more than I expected. It’s easy to fall for your own idea. Being honest about what’s assumption versus evidence, and testing it early and cheaply, is harder than it sounds, especially when there’s no existing product to react to. We could have validated some things sooner and saved ourselves real effort.
Getting this kind of end-to-end experience is hard to come by inside a big organisation. That’s been the real gift of doing it as a startup.