In any startup, every hour counts. Hours are purchased by dollars which creates the space and time for our team to work together.
We occupy that time to craft solutions that carefully meets the needs of our customers so that their businesses grow towards greater profitability. That in turn creates so much value for our customer that they send us their dollars which in turn creates more space and time for us!
<aside> 💡 The greatest advantage of the One Pagers is that they act as a buffer between developer time and the demands that come with product management.
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Of course there are plenty of detractors to the smooth flow of this cycle like the lack of investment, the scarcity of talent and the friction to finding product market fit. As CTO, you should be very engaged in this startup cycle.
Let’s focus on an area of waste that occurs in the flow of dollars to hours to the team. This takes on the form of wasted developer hours. In the mad rush to get features developed to woo new customers, or fine tune existing ones, developers can be pulled in all sorts of directions.
But what if these requests are legit? What if the developer pool is over utilized? How do we ensure that we’re not wasting any developer time as we test new features in the market or roll the dice on others?
We designed a new currency called the One Pager (also referred to as the OP). The OP is to the pool of developer hours what a bank note is to a currency. It is the physical manifestation of developer time and commitment that the rest of the company can trade with.
The OP is a document that lives inside your Kanban board. Many also consider this to be part of the Epic definition for the feature.
Every time there is a need to build something, create a new OP with the following template:
Document in a few sentences exactly what the problem is that needs to be solved
How will we know that the problem is indeed solved?