This is an attempt to capture the activities & reflections over the last week. Our usual team cadence involves morning meetings starting at 1015AM and evening meetings at 515PM. All our morning meetings starts with a check-in (we have a slack bot that does this for us every morning).
Monday
Our Monday meetings are usually longer which involves planning activity for the week. For this week, at the beginning of the meeting itself, we decided to declare the entire week for planning – which meant halt on our operational cadence including Monday stakeholder emails (My cadence involves KS sessions, Open house on Saturdays, spending time with team members on their respective tracks/ help wherever required and the Monday stakeholder emails – weekly & team).
The objective of the planning exercise was to get to a strong close for the month, review/ reflect on activities of last quarter and plan for the next.
One of the key discussions points was to shift from a project based organisation structure to a capability based organisation structure. We also listed out the priority outcome for the upcoming quarter(s).
Over the last, we've been tinkering with notion for organising our thoughts and knowledge wiki. The whole team felt good about this and we decided to move to notion and work towards organising our units within notion over the week.
My focus points was to get on top of the stakeholder relationship/ management & work with Sijo on the policy unit. ( Sijo has been invited as a member in one of the consultative committees for drafting the next STIP & is a part of the Entrepreneurship – TG (Thematic Group)).
Tuesday
WEQ Notion page
One of the use cases with notion workspaces is that it can act as intranet and an external page at the same time. We figured this could be a great use case for our WEQ project. Karthika anchors the WEQ activities from our team. So Karthika & I tag teamed to put together a notion workspace for WEQ, an external page with past winners (WEQ Wall), new admission details, FAQ et al & and intranet for our portfolio founders with contact/ cohort information and partner stack – this is a work in progress.
Working session with Sijo & Karthika
Had a working session with Karthika and Sijo to put together a work plan for the next quarter of WEQ. This was a great exercise – both with respect to the planning angle and stakeholder relationship management.
Wednesday
KS Session
I had a KS session with Srikrishnan Ganesan who is the founder of Rocketlane (Previously founded Konotor and exited to Freshworks). It was great to hear Sri's story of building Konotor, the exit and restarting with Rocketlane. Sri and I connected in late 2014 during the Next Big Idea cohort which my previous company was also a part of. We had a great time in Toronto spending close to 10 days during the program. Because of that, the KS session was more of a conversation than an interview.
Sri & I – Niagara falls visit during NBI
Working session with Sijo
Had another working session with Sijo on one of our stakeholder bit. Again, this was a great opportunity to learn with respect to planning and thinking. After the session, we got on a call with the stakeholder running through the plan and deciding on next steps.
Thursday
Partnership Stack
I spent some time listing out the partners to reach out for the partnership stack. Also scheduled a call with Gokul for Saturday to get his guidance on how to go about partnerships.
IRC Chat
I decided to turn my old laptop to an IRC chat server! Spent sometime installing the new version of Ubuntu (LTS 20). I had an outdated elementary OS which I wiped clean and installed the new version of Ubuntu. It was a straight forward process since there were tons of articles to help setup IRC servers.
Friday
KS Sessions
Had a KS session with Jasleen Kaur Lamba, Senior Manager at Invest India. It was a congenial conversation since we knew each other from the WING project (A capacity building program for women founders by Invest India). Jasleen shared her professional story and about Invest India during our session.
I had another KS scheduled with Cherian, founder of Cucumbertown (exited to cookpad) and currently VP of Intl. business at Byju's but had to be rescheduled. This gave me sometime to tinker with democracyos. Sijo mentioned about this during one of our conversations to see if we could use this platform for our policy unit/ efforts. Turns out the official support for the open source repository has ended and when tried to get this up and running, faced with a lot of issues because of the deprecated libraries.
Thanks to Joseph Stephen, I was able to get it up and running. Will need to do more tinkering and testing before we could decide if we want to use this for our policy unit efforts.
Side note: Joseph and I were batch mates during our undergrad at TIST. We were a part of team that built a mars rover replica for the URC (University Rover Challenge) that happened in Texas, 2014. Also, one of the best problem solvers (coding/ electronics) that I've come across.
No evening meeting
For Friday, we decided to skip the evening meeting and share our updates as voice notes (30-60 sec clips) on a telegram channel. Turns out, this is a great way to get to speed on updates as telegram auto plays one clip after the other. We also decided not to ask clarifying questions as a response to the clips to avoid this becoming a conversation thread. For me, it worked well with respect to getting to speed but was concerned about the searchability and important updates not getting logged.
Saturday
The whole first half Saturday, we spent on reviewing/ reflecting our activities, haring concerns and planning ahead. Decided to remove evening team meetings from our cadence and instead will use the voice note update mechanism going forward.
Partnership stack conversation with Gokul
Karthika & I got on a call with Gokul as decided to get his guidance on partner onboarding and negotiations.
Key takeaways from the week
- Reduce scope
Reducing scope and moving parts makes it easier to achieve the operating rhythm. Case in point, last week, Jomol & I decided to remove the playlist updating on website to a link to YouTube playlist and reduce the overlay complexity for KS session which helped us execute KS with ease.
- Time for planning (operate in Q2)
We need to keep aside ample time for planning. Reflection on last week was an eyeopener. The moment we deiced to halt our operational cadence freed up a lot of mind space to think and plan. Simply put, it was a relaxed week but we were able to move the needle with respect to planing for outcomes.
- Tag teaming
This week was an inflection point regarding tag teaming. Seeing ourselves as capability units opened up a lot avenues (thinking wise in my head!) for tag teaming.
To a great week that was 🍺
