What makes a good startup or corporate innovation project team? Do we need Hackers, Hustlers, and Hipsters in every "good" team? What is needed to go through the Build-Measure-Learn lean startup loop? What kind of team is needed to build Minimum Viable Products?

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The Complete
Team

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Talent is in Short Supply
● Common sense wisdom used to be that engineers
were the most critical team members.
● The good ones were rare and hard to come by.
Sometimes we called them ninjas or 10Xers.
● More recently, the proliferation of consumer web
apps made design a key differentiator. Everyone
who knew photoshop was suddenly rebranding
themselves as a UX designer.
● No one really knew the difference between UX
and UI, but we called them unicorns anyway and
started the hunt.

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The Balanced Team
● Some of this perfect team concept comes from the
Balanced Team paradigm and perhaps Ideo, who
even gives a nice venn diagram showing the
origin of it on their about page.
● The Balanced Team works great in many
situations.
o The designer is responsible for desirability of the product.
Talking with customers, understanding their needs, making
sure the experience doesn’t suck.
o The engineer is responsible for the feasibility. S/he must
determine if the product can actually be built, how, and for how
much.The business person is responsible for the viability of
the business model. S/he acts as the scales of justice when
feasibility conflicts with desirability.
o The business person also takes care of the profit & loss
statement and often manages the personalities involved.

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Incomplete Teams
● The thing about abstract concepts is that they’re
abstract. Reality often disagrees. The balanced
team paradigm falls short when it is directly
translated from concept to person. The important
thing is the role.
● Remember, there are four parts to any MVP:
Customer, Value Proposition, Channel, and
Relationship The MVP is not just about building
the product.
● What about the feasibility of the channel? Don’t
have the person with the big rolodex and hustling
skills? Then we have an incomplete team.

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Tristan’s Incompleteness Theorem
● An incomplete team’s iteration velocity is limited
by its missing pieces and its budget.
● That is to say, if we’re missing a key skill or role,
we’re stuck. We will be unable to learn or make
any progress in experimenting until members of
our team are able to acquire that skill. OR…you
can hire someone to fill in a gap.
● That gap might be a team that is: Selling an
enterprise CRM with no sales person. In Ukraine
selling to the German market with no one who
speaks fluent German.

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The Complete Team
● The complete team is able to complete the Build-
Measure-Learn loop, including all Four Parts of
the Minimum Viable Product.
● They will have to build the sales channel and
measure product progress via the customer
relationship. Often the Hustler (a.k.a., Guy Who
Can’t Code) takes on these other responsibilities
and wears many hats.
● Sometimes, others can perform more than one
role, playing designer half the time and managing
to get some sales calls in on the side. It’s not
about the number of people, but if there is a skills
gap.

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No Constant
● One of the most infuriating things about a
Complete Team is that the definition changes over
time.
● At the beginning of a project, we might not need
an engineer. We just need to go talk to customers.
We might not need a designer for a backend B2B
application.
● We may need an outbound marketer to run a
Google AdWords campaign, but we only need a
few hundred visits to run our landing page test, so
it’s hardly a full time job!

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Temporary Completeness
● Often the solution to these gaps is part time staff.
It’s often a dissatisfying level of quality, but better
than nothing!
● Mediocre part time help is often better than trying
to multitask. One of the great advantages that
large corporations have over startups is a vast
reserve of human capital. Which is what makes it
even funnier when they fail to utilize it.
● Many corporations are underfunding their startups
by insisting they “be scrappy” instead of just giving
them the budget to hire someone to run a Google
AdWords campaign.

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Temporary Completeness
● There are certain skills that every team member in
every startup should learn. Everyone should be
able to talk to customers and have an insightful
customer discovery conversation.
● But does every startup need to learn AdWords
from scratch? Is that a critical skill? No. This is
where more advanced accelerator programs like
500 Startups (who, unlike most accelerators, have
an actual business model) have a massive
advantage.

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Key Takeaways
● The team needs complete skill sets to go around
the Build-Measure-Learn loop quickly
● Team composition will change over time
● Geographic boundaries affect team needs in terms
of sales, marketing, design, and language ability
● Startups: Consider outsourcing for completeness
● Corporations & Accelerators: Consider shared
services for completeness