learnings – two minute tactics

in all labour there's profit, even if it's not paid!

last week we completed our first run-down of a customer project at the ai coe at apex. we're taking a hybrid approach of consulting and saas, where we talk to our customers, figure out painpoints and then instead of signing a project and selling the hours (which would be the normal consulting approach), we build a micro-saas out of it and sell a license. we aim for 5-10 b2b customers per product which will then cover our implementation costs.

to do this profitably, we need rock-solid estimations for implementations. now, i come from a product background, so doing these estimations is completely foreign to me! in this first round with our customers, i delivered horrible work!

what i could've done to defend myself, was to claim it was fine the way it is, or to hand it off to someone else and let them take responsibility, or even to blame others for lack of input or wrong expectations.

but every situation is an opportunity to learn, so i took full ownership of everything that went wrong. even if everyone else behaves the same way next time, i will make sure to do my best to prevent the same outcome!

and instead of just reading up on doing estimations and getting decent at it, i decided to go full in. this team will be big and it will be important, and correct estimations are crucial for the success, so i've asked to do an internship with someone internally who's really good at doing proper estimations and creating good expectations with customers around implementations.

i often use the idea of the "mario speed booster:" the lane where you get accelerated quickly to catch up to everyone else. i want to get the brain dump from someone who's on top of their game and catch up so fast, that even if i only take away 60% i will still be ahead of almost everyone else.

excellence is the word and i strive for it. my core values are empathy, curiosity and excellence! i don't always reach there immediately, but if i caught the bug for something, i will keep analyizing and optimizing until i reach there eventually.

now what about you?

task: i want you to sit down and figure out whether you are missing out on learning opportunities somewhere? do you always take full ownership? if you're also looking for excellence, then you need to practice all the time and everywhere you can! only then you will make it in time

now again as usual, my name is nicolai, i'm the head of engineering at apex and this was something tactical in two minutes or less, see you next time!