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Scale like a Startup

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Scale like a Startup | Luke Hohmann

Luke Hohmann

April 15, 2021

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Imagine you're a startup, either within an existing company (intrapreneurship) or as a new corporate entity, like FirstRoot (entrepreneurship). While you're starting small, you want to 'grow into something big' - and you want to leverage the best thinking possible as you do it!

You could start with Scrum or Kanban. But then you'd end up piecing together all of the rest of what you need to be successful - things like market segmentation, personas, journey maps, story maps, and financial modeling. Instead of building your solution, you'd spend a lot of time building how to build your solution.

Of course, if you're a methodologist, that's exactly what you love to do! You love to piece stuff together and tailor methods. But if you're an intra or entrepreneur, you'd rather invest that time in building your company.

Startups also need to make significant investment decisions. Invest money wisely and you grow. Spend money poorly and fail. It would therefore be ideal if your process supported you in making high-impact portfolio choices. And because startups are dealing with extreme uncertainty, it would be ideal if the investment decision-making process promoted collaboration with employees, investors, customers, and partners/suppliers. And when these portfolio decisions result in contracts, it would be ideal if contracts you create are grounded in agile values.

The approach we are taking at FirstRoot is to start with the Portfolio Configuration of SAFe® and lightly tailor it to meet our needs. This might seem surprising, as many people perceive SAFe as a 'heavy' or 'complex' method. Starting with SAFe is starting with the end in mind: if you're successful, you will created a culture geared for growth: your founding team will know that the practices they're using are the practices that future teams will be using. Instead of being a methodologist and building methods, you can be an entrepreneur and build solutions.

Luke will share the story of how FirstRoot, a Silicon Valley startup designed to promote economic equality through Participatory Budgeting, is preparing to scale by starting with scaling in mind. Key learnings include the importance of selecting an uber-architecture, how to build the domain knowledge needed to create a high-performance development organization from scratch, how to leverage design thinking to ensure you’re building the right thing, and how to balance strategy (long range thinking and planning) with tactics (the iterations and Sprints of Agile).

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About Luke Hohmann

Photo of Luke Hohmann

Founder and CEO @ FirstRoot, Inc.

Luke is founder and CEO of FirstRoot, Inc. Our mission is to create the next generation of impact investors. Our unique go-to-market strategy supports all stakeholders as youth use participatory budgeting to invest real money in their schools. Youth learn the 5 C's of modern education: creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and civics as they experience true agency and stewardship over their futures, learning through their own experiences how money really works.

Previously a SAFe® Framework Contributor and Principal Consultant, Luke was Founder and CEO of Conteneo, Inc. (acquired by Scaled Agile, Inc.) where he worked with an extraordinary dev team to create the Weave, Strategy Engine and Knowsy® decision agility platforms.

The author of four books, numerous articles and cited as an inventor on more than a dozen patents, Luke is an internationally recognized expert in Agile Software Development. Luke co-organized the first Agile conference in 2003, has served on the Board of the Agile Alliance and in partnership with the Scrum Alliance produced the "Collaboration at Scale", the world's largest monthly webinar devoted to helping organizations with 10 or more Scrum teams in 2 or more locations scale agility.

Luke is a highly sought after speaker has as keynoted such conferences as the Agile Alliance conference, Agile Australia, Lean-Agile Scotland, Agile New Zealand, the Austrian Innovation Forum, the CXPA and the SAFe Summit.

Luke is the co-founder of Every Voice Engaged Foundation, a 501c3 nonprofit that helps citizens, governments and nonprofit organizations collaboratively solve problems that are unsolvable without civic engagement. EVEF has been a leader in the Participatory Budgeting movement, helping citizens prioritize hundreds of millions of dollars through Budget Games.

A former United States National Junior Pairs Figure Skating Champion, Luke likes playing with his four kids, his wife’s cooking and long runs in the Santa Cruz mountains. Luke’s an old school Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Instead of building companies to flip, he builds companies that make the world better!

Follow them on LinkedIn:
https://linkedin.com/in/lukehohmann/%E2%80%8B

Presentation Slides

Summary Transcript

Many of you might be thinking, “Are you nuts? SAFe, this enormous framework that’s supposedly un-agile?” You might be surprised. I am a former member of the SAFe framework team, responsible for Agile Product Delivery and Lean Portfolio Management. I was also the principal author of the current SAFe LPM, APM, and POPM courses. So, I’ve had some influence in shaping SAFe, and today, I want to share how it supports my startup journey.

My Background

I am a serial entrepreneur and philanthropist, involved with the Every Voice Engage Foundation. I’ve contributed to the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, authored four books (with more to come), and continue to have fun in the Agile world.

What Makes a Good Startup?

A successful startup needs:

  • A compelling problem to solve
  • A large enough market to sustain profitability
  • Desirability, viability, feasibility, and sustainability
  • A caring and competent team
  • A pinch of humility and a whole kilo of crazy

At First Root, we are fighting financial inequality worldwide through a participatory budgeting app built for schools and students. We have a passionate team, and for those who think I’m crazy—well, when I introduced Innovation Games at the 2003 Agile Conference, everyone thought I was nuts, but it worked out.

How Do You Build a Startup?

Building a startup requires:

  • Understanding customers through design thinking
  • Investing in architecture
  • Collaboration and planning
  • Experimentation through the Lean Startup approach
  • Economic forecasting to ensure sustainability

Wait a minute—isn’t all of this in SAFe?

SAFe as a Startup Framework

The exact center of SAFe is the customer. Everything revolves around them. SAFe provides four configurations, and while many think of the full or large solution configurations, the portfolio configuration is the sweet spot for startups.

In the portfolio configuration, SAFe includes:

  • The Business Model Canvas
  • Strategic Themes
  • Estimation techniques
  • A variation of the Lean Startup cycle for experiments
  • Market-based release timing

For example, since we develop software for schools, releasing in June (when students are on break) makes no sense. Instead, we align releases with academic cycles.

Emphasizing Key SAFe Elements

One critical aspect of SAFe for startups is Managed Investment Contracts. These contracts promote collaboration between purchasers and suppliers. We started with a six-month contract to build cadence and trust, running one-week iterations to maximize feedback.

Education is also key in a startup. We ensure both employees and contractors understand:

  • The problem we are solving
  • The technology we are using
  • Agile practices through resources like SAFe’s Agile Software Engineering videos

Agile Product Delivery

Agile Product Delivery in SAFe ensures we build the right thing the right way. This involves:

  • Customer centricity and design thinking
  • DevOps and a continuous delivery pipeline
  • Developing on cadence but releasing on demand

We integrate tools like Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle and the Value Proposition Canvas to refine our approach.

Tailoring SAFe for Startups

We modified certain SAFe elements, including:

  • Adapting the persona canvas to better fit our needs
  • Using graphic novels to document user stories
  • Conducting extensive usability testing to ensure our product meets real-world needs

Architectural Runway and Iterative Development

When starting from scratch, everything is architectural runway. We prioritized:

  • Internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n)
  • Cross-platform support using Flutter
  • A UI driven by usability testing
  • API-driven and event-sourced architecture
  • Compliance with security regulations

Instead of a formal PI Planning, we followed an iterative approach:

  1. Align the team on the problem and mission
  2. Choose the overarching architecture
  3. Develop the data model and spike it
  4. Design the UI vision and spike it
  5. Design the API and spike it

Learning and Adjusting

We encountered challenges and made necessary pivots:

  • We started with React but switched to Flutter
  • We explored REST APIs but moved to GraphQL
  • We changed our company name from Tilladin to First Root
  • We reworked our performance tuning on Heroku

Our first release was incomplete—students could create proposals but not vote. However, with a strong CI/CD pipeline, we quickly iterated, completing our app within three months.

The Bigger Picture

Our work is driven by a deep mission. If you want to understand the importance of financial equality, I highly recommend reading The Spirit Level. Research shows that economic inequality leads to worse outcomes in trust, health, incarceration rates, and mental well-being. This understanding inspired me to build a startup that promotes economic participation through participatory budgeting in schools.

Final Thoughts

Some might ask, “Why not use Kanban or Scrum instead of SAFe?” The answer is simple: SAFe already includes everything we need—customer centricity, design thinking, sound economic decision-making, and portfolio management. Rather than bolting these onto another framework, I prefer starting with SAFe and tailoring it as needed.

Startups are challenging but rewarding. With SAFe as our guiding structure, we are able to innovate, iterate, and create meaningful impact. Thank you!

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