End of the year is here and our office is shutting down on Thursday. At the end of each year I run a retrospective with my team on our accomplishments and failures for that year. In a startup, it’s easy to focus on your failures, because it might seem there are more of them, or that they are more meaningful. And I think that is fine. 90% of our retrospectives are spent analyzing the KPIs we didn’t meet, and understanding why we didn’t meet them. Being honest about where you are, and how you got there, is essential in any business. In startups, it’s a requirement.
This year we pivoted into a platform marketplace, bringing banks into our lending and savings platform for MNOs. I learned that building a platform doesn’t just include the software side of the business. It also means the human, cultural, and organizational sides of the business. I assumed that if we could build a platform, that the rest would fall in place. That isn’t true. I didn’t work hard enough to build the structures and processes to unleash the people around me, or in other teams. A platform business is a fundamentally different type of business than what we were before. A whole level of new interactions comes on board, and the people behind those interactions require support, sales, reporting, communication briefs, and bespoke analysis. Those things require people to provide them, and people require leadership and a belief in what they are doing. It was unfair for me to assume that would just happen, and everyone would understand clearly how being a platform meant they had to change the way they worked, and the outputs they were responsible for. But I’ve learned that now, thanks to a retrospective, and we’re going to be a hell of a lot better next year.