It was my pleasure to be invited to the international expert panel session, organized by Prof. Linda Hickman and her Expert+ network on June 25th.
Linda is Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economy, LSE, and refers to many years of scientific work and management positions in international industrial concerns. The Expert+ network, which Linda has founded, concentrate on international startup founders, who often have finished their business careers and seek to start with new ideas into new activities as a startup.
The questions of this evening related to the cooperation between technology experts, which many founders need to onboard. I picked out:
- Where to Start? Which is more important to get right initially, the front end – customer ordering or operations, the back room – order fulfilment?
- At what point should you bring in a technical member to the startup team?
Considering that Krause3PM usually works with high-tech-startups, who rather seek to hire business experts then technicians, this inversed problem setting from the eCommerce and FinTech area was quite interesting.
Anyway, one thing keeps unchanged and this is how I answered these questions. Each company must safeguard that all its processes and operations fulfill highest quality requirements and ensure seamless positive customer experiences with the company. Hence only fulfillment of accepted customer orders can have prio-1 over a perfectly designed front end.
The question, when to hire tech-experts, is directly in line with the question, when to add a partner to the company’s partner-eco-system. Coworkers are partners too! The answer on this is based on a well-considered make-or-buy decision, do it yourself or let it be done.
The same methods of professional Partner Management apply too, which you use when selecting suppliers or cooperation partners!
Refer to us when you’ve got questions about your partner-eco-system and/or staffing.