Architect Gone Rogue - Zinc Week 15

For myself, friends, family, former colleagues, future colleagues, clients, collaborators, acquaintances, investors, interested bystanders picked up on the way and other generally nosey people...

This is the journey of an Architect gone rogue and trying something different.

Stocktake

After booking in our Stocktake presentation, stayce cavanaugh and I had to compile a one pager outlining what we'd been working on including the problem, the solution, the team, the commercial opportunity and the potential impact the business could have.

After putting together a pitch, which doubled up as our working strategy document we'd been using to try and strike a common language, we gave a 10 minute presentation to the Zinc team, which was followed by 40 minutes of Q&A. The presentation additionally included a summary of our vision and mission, competitor analysis, market research, a 10 year impact plan, as well as details on what form our solution for improving home health would take.

The formal feedback received later was that Stayce and I made an exciting and complementary team and had a potentially exciting idea, but that we needed to put more effort into user research and developing the personas of those experiencing the problem i.e. putting more time into 'product', as well as research into the technical viability of the hardware and software.

'Product'

The 'Product' word is one that's on my mind and keeps coming up time and time again on the venture builder programme. Prior to Zinc , I thought I knew what the word meant - a physical product that is bought and sold, or at a stretch, the design of a service that was bought and sold. I thought that product was the outcome.

So, what is Product, if not the outcome? Is it short for Product Development? Is it short for Product Management?! What is Product Leadership? It seems to change depending on what is being worked on and who is working on it.

In the few conversations I've had with those on the programme, people seem to broadly agree but still struggle to pin down the specifics, perhaps due to dropping 'development' or 'management', in favour of simply 'product'. More here.

Applied to the usual workflow of an Architect, it seems that product development is the internal, office based and aspirationally linear path of creating and developing information through the RIBA Plan of Work stages from inception to completion.

Product Management seems to be the outward facing journey Architects go on to get to milestones in architectural projects involving all stakeholders, for example responding to feedback from public consultations, engagement with the planning department, QS, client, operator, and managing / leading the project design team to create a design that is coordinated and works.

In short, Architects seem to work in both product development and product management roles simultaneously, which is perhaps why Stayce said she could see me working as a product manager at 谷歌 .

Development

Another thing I've been learning about this week via my coach, David Hopper , and conversations with Natalia Baltazar , are the different ways of developing software alongside 'product' and how these compare with procurement strategies when developing buildings. Traditional procurement in architecture i.e. a complete design given to the contractor to price and build is akin to 'waterfall development' in software - design up front, before the waterfall.

Design & Build procurement in architecture and construction (to get on site quicker, continue designing whilst the contractor has started building and transferring the risk away from the client) is more closely linked to agile software development, which seems to be the defacto way of doing things and is enabled by the fluidity of software and a reduced number of parties and their agendas that come with it.

Thanks

David Hopper for learnings on working with software developers ??????

Zinc for the stocktake. Looking forward to working with Hannah Abdel-Hadi ??

James Scales of Queen Mary University London for the exploratory chat ??

James Naylor of Apple for explaining some of the legal hurdles with consumer electronics ??

Thought of the Week

Architects' and Software architects' language doesn't seem so different after all.

Other Zinc VB7 Bloggers

Donna Egan - Late Career Entrepreneur here

Louise Thomas - Air Aware Labs here

Natalia Baltazar - A Founder in the Making here

Guy Naor - Time for a Redesign here

Pavandeep Rai - The Road to Entrepreneurship here

Marjo Palanee - HealthTech Founder's Story here