Divide & Conquer: Help Your Startup Navigate the Unknown—Part 2

This is the second part of a trilogy of articles addressing the pitch deck to the usable product impedance mismatch all startups face.

Here’s part one if you missed it.

The first part of the article set up the decor and painted the “Divide & Conquer” paradigm with broad strokes.

This part is dedicated to self-sufficient Lego blocks of varying sizes that you can leverage today. It’s a hands-on technical read, but it’s essential and, I’m sure, worth every minute of your time.

It’s a non-exhaustive list of common assets you’ll undoubtedly need early in the process and, therefore, can safely start implementing even if the future’s still nebulous.

Definition of Done (DoD)

Note: I begin the list with DoD because other examples refer to it, not necessarily because it ranks higher.

DoD is one of the unavoidable frameworks companies establish implicitly or explicitly. You could have an official whitepaper in the wiki, or your team already follows a series of unwritten conventions. Officialise it in writing.

My DoDs consist of front-end, back-end, UI/UX and project management sections. You might describe a typical React component’s file structure and the terminology to follow and provide an example. Often, I recommend IDE plugins that help generate the necessary folders and files with their appropriate boilerplate contents from a template I provide. Click to bootstrap the skeleton. Fill in the gaps.

Let me know if you’d like a glimpse into my typical DoD in Notion or Obsidian . I’m happy to share it.

Company Knowledge Management

Information and knowledge management are not minor undertakings, and if there’s no one champion within the company responsible for keeping it tight, everybody’s random contributions result in a brew of disconnected bits that don’t add up to the whole picture.

The DoD mentioned above usually resides in a company wiki. We all take notes, but everybody does it in their own way. This is okay unless there’s a need for collaboration.

Most tools today allow you to connect remote resources, such as shared folders, and display them alongside notes taken within the tool. One thing’s for sure: you’ll need a centralised repository you can direct everybody to when onboarding people or when someone asks a question you know was already answered.

Note: Personal Knowledge Management, or PKM, is my passion. If you want to make sense of your and your startup’s intel in an efficient and structured way, I write a newsletter about it .

Legal and Accounting Assets

Terms and conditions, cookie policies, NDAs, employment contracts, invoice templates, etc. If you’re part of an incubator or have a network, don’t reinvent the wheel; ask for templates, at least at the early stage.

Component-Driven Development (CDD)

CDD is perfect for engineering complex solutions by splitting them into smaller, reusable parts. Each element would be responsible for an isolated portion of the entire product. Ideally, this portion should be small enough not to take on too much responsibility yet large enough for us to care to package it on its own.

Front-End

You will likely require UI (User Interface) tokens like buttons, sliders, and modal windows. In these circumstances, composing a context-agnostic UI kit is recommended. Create in isolation to keep your components reusable across various environments, such as mobile/web applications, landing pages, or printable pitch decks.

You could “bake it in” for now and extract the necessary bits later to save time. However, if the chances of reusing these visual assets elsewhere are high, moving slower now to be faster later is a sensible choice. Don't be afraid to postpone gratification despite traditional startup kumbaya.

One of the first things I usually introduce is Storybook . A tool to help front-end developers create components in isolation. Gradually, a bag of resilient, self-sufficient, unbreakable components is being filled. Adding this tool early in development will initially make you move slightly slower. Still, it will exponentially accelerate the pace if you have the necessary stamina to get over the initial hump.

A dedicated Storybook file for each web component is part of the DoD. If an element doesn’t work in isolation, it’s not considered to be working.

Back-End

Another resilient Lego piece of cloud-native startups is Infrastructure as Code (IaC). It describes all building blocks of a serverless architecture as code that can be version-controlled, collaborated on, deployed or destroyed with a press of a button.

Your infrastructure will gain mobility should you want to move within the same cloud provider or do what I call “digital vagabonding”: startups jumping ship as soon as they run out of free credits generously provided by one of the few players.

My IaCs primarily use Amazon Web Services (AWS) CDK v2 written in TypeScript . I’ll happily share it if you want to glimpse it. Reach out .

Other

CDD principles apply to npm, Inc. packages, Ruby gems or Java beans. They can be stored openly or in privately maintained artefact repositories. It’s worth implementing.

Project Management Framework & Tools

You could choose the tools and templates you’ll use when project management becomes relevant. You can describe future modus operandi in DoD or configure your future system upfront.

Official Website and Landing Page Templates

You’ll need a website. Furthermore, many Lean Startup Co. -like experiments will run on separate dedicated landing pages. You need a way to create those quickly, preferably without putting it on the shoulders of your development team. Ideally, these pages will be tightly integrated with your CRM. HubSpot , for example, offers paid extensions, allowing you to generate landing pages, track engagement, and collect leads.?

Another useful weapon you can use for A/B testing of your business hypothesis is 谷歌 ’s Optimize or PostHog 's A/B testing. Its integration has a few quirks if you’re using React as your main front-end driver, but it’s worth the upfront investment.?

Reach out if you want to look at my implementation.

User Accounts Management System

You want many users, which you’ll need to store securely in a user pool. I’ve seen some companies managing their user information in open text. Don’t be them.

You won’t have access to passwords, making future user pool modifications more resource-heavy. I highly recommend deciding upon the appropriate balance between security and convenience for your business as early as possible. A cryptocurrency startup does not have the same user management needs as an online calculator.

Payment Processing

Since the goal of every business is to make money, you're guaranteed to require a way to accept customers’ lolly. Therefore, you don't need to wait until a payment gateway integration becomes urgent. Dive into its documentation now and maybe even implement it in a vacuum.?

It might bestow valuable hints for your engineering decisions.

For instance, Stripe expresses all values in the smallest unit of a given currency instead of a usual localised format. No more dots, commas and shady approximations. This makes working with currencies without any fractional values, such as the Japanese Yen, identical to those that do, such as the Euro. Such a data modelling nugget saved our data engineering team countless conversion struggles.

Great artists steal.

Design System Blocks

The need for a unified corporate visual identity and tone of voice arises almost the day the company is established. Such a system acts as a collection of guardrails every employee should adhere to so that no incoherence is being introduced. Colour palettes, typography, iconography, and overall look and feel are all part of it.

Today’s tools let you manage design tokens in a CDD fashion, where smaller blocks are rearranged into higher-order visual assets. For tone of voice, you could use a business plan from Grammarly .

Set up your tools and immediately create a few separate projects you’ll need throughout the entire lifecycle of a company: a globally reusable design tokens library, UI kit, web application, mobile or desktop application, pitch deck, and social media assets.

Testing Frameworks

Quality Assurance is a weird aspect of the making process: everybody seems to understand the importance of it, yet generally, not enough resources are being dedicated to it, if at all. Unless you preach TDD or Test-Driven Development, you might not even have a test framework.

The initial setup and automation of a class of tests is not a huge investment. You can reap many benefits by kicking low-hanging fruits: smoke and snapshot tests. I implement them as part of web components and cloud infrastructure IaC constructs, executed upon every code commit as part of CI/CD. They’re a DoD requirement, too.

Development Automation

It’s always tricky to justify prioritising developers’ comfort over customer-facing features. Most people dogmatically believe that customer value should overrule absolutely everything. But it’s not all black or white.

Value has to be shipped within reasonable deadlines, comply with a certain level of quality, and not break the bank. None of this is possible when working in a shop where mechanics have to jump over piles of lumped tools. Where’s the hammer? We don’t have a crank; let’s wait for Joe so he can hold the engine while we unscrew things from the bottom. For some reason, situations like these don’t sound as ridiculous to startup founders.

Here are a few things I don’t think any modern and efficient technical team can live without: Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), Git hooks, linting, formatting, private Git repositories and code artefact stores, and automatic documentation generation.

What’s your toolset? Let’s geek out in the comments.

Business Analysis Blocks

Everybody overlooks this paramount asset. It’s one of the first deliverables I work on, even if I was hired to do something else. If I get fired for doing so, it means I wasn’t in the right company anyway. It’s that important.

My approach to building this asset is controversial because I use toolsets characteristic of well-established corporations. Many startup founders look down on them. But I have yet to find something better than the Unified Modelling Language, or UML, to depict the entire business or its portions with diagrams.

Critical parts of such analysis are ERDs (Entity Relationship Diagrams), Use Case Diagrams, State Machines, Sequence Diagrams, Flow Charts, and Data-Flow Diagrams. UML’s much broader, but I must apply the Pareto Principle since I rarely wear only an analyst’s hat.

Let me know if you know of a more modern and aesthetically pleasing way of modelling. I’ve been looking for a while now.

Analytics

You need eyes.

You can only improve what you can measure. Have a Google Tag Manager set up as early as possible. Don’t let developers be the bottleneck when implementing basic tracking. Their job won’t stop, but it’ll unlock tons of value out of the box.

CRM & ERP

You need a heart.

A source of truth for customer relationships and enterprise resources. If having no visibility on marketing and sales funnels and letting individual employees walk away with all their accounts upon quitting is okay with the company’s upper management, you’re in the wrong company.

Non-technical people expect techies to work in a structured way. But it goes both ways. A weekly update like “many interesting conversations” will feel like a big joke, and you’ll lose respect.

Conclusion

This list was long but far from complete. My goal was to share with you the staples. Your mileage might vary depending on the nature of the business.

The last part will focus on possible divisions of a bigger whole into smaller homogenous chunks of equivalent size.

Are there any specific building blocks you’d be interested to hear about?

Special Thanks

This write-up relied heavily on the attentive eyes of Lilian T. , Farouq Aldori , Teppo Hudsson , Jarek Owczarek , Николай Цыбулянко , and Jason Collins .

If you liked this article, you would enjoy my website .