We hit three big milestones recently. We signed an NDA with one of the 11 P2Ps in Malaysia for data sharing, garnered support from RHB Group Senior Management for a pilot project and were selected as one of 5 teams to proceed into the Launch phase of PING. Week 22 marks the end of Accelerate and as May would describe it, we now need to become a real business.
Reflecting on our 5-month journey, I wanted to dedicate this newsletter to the topic:
Keeping the team aligned was one of the biggest challenges in V-Cred. We had some members who joined part time and some remotely, so writing things down was always necessary to keep others up to date. We heavily utilized Mural for brainstorming ideas, took notes from every interview and started this very newsletter to regularly recap the past.
But the team still felt lost. Our first Sprint Retro (equivalent to post-mortem) revealed that while documentation was highlighted as a key strength, there was still a lack of clarity on individual roles, work delegation and the general team direction. This opened our eyes to a need to write about the future. May began sending weekly plans into our group chat while Nian Wei wrote frameworks for us to think about “What is V-Cred?” and align our team’s priorities. We started breaking up our calendar into two-week sprints and categorized tasks as being customer-focused, solution-focused or busy corporate work. While work in all three categories were crucial, creating distinctions helped us to balance the three and understand where our efforts were going.
Writing so far has given us greater clarity looking back and facing forward, but it hasn’t quite given us the tools we needed to look within. How do we ensure everyone’s hearts are aligned? We realized one month into V-Cred that we were rarely all in the same place. So, meeting up in person more frequently and team lunches were an easy place to start. Having regular debrief sessions after big milestones was another ritual we practiced to give each other honest feedback. Lots of empathy, trust in each other and open communication were needed to grow as a team. Despite the differences we had in skill, experience and time to put into V-Cred, every member gave their best to push for the team’s success. For that, everyone is valued equally and knows that they are an important part of the team.
Writing all this down is my attempt at figuring out the key ingredients that has helped us progress so far, to hopefully help our future selves stay on the same page as the present. Keeping the team aligned can be challenging, but this has forced us to build strategies that inadvertently became our greatest strengths.
“Writing is a superpower.” – Dr. Ed
Abbrev: NDA – Non-disclosure Agreement, P2P – Peer-to-peer lender, PING – PETRONAS Innovation Garage
