Sunday Rewind: Scaling at full speed by Tanja Lau

This week’s Sunday Rewind is a 2018 talk from MTP Engage Hamburg in which Tanja Lau looks back at some of her key learnings from the previous three years, and her work Swiss online marketplace Siroop, since acquired by Co-op Switzerland.

Tanja starts by saying you’ve got to love fixing something broken, and that despite being in the media spotlight from the outset, they tried very hard to do things that didn’t scale. She says this requires that you don’t panic when things go south and that you de-scope even when you think you can no longer afford to do so.

She says you should negotiate results not scope. Discussions tend to be driven by the stakeholders’ fear of having to give up anything that has been built so far. At Siroop, after painfully experiencing this phenomenon they eventually agreed on a set of metrics that would tell them when it was time to switch to the new platform – no matter what scope had been built at that point in time.

Finally, she says that bootstrapping is so much easier when you don’t have any money to spend. If you are really well-funded from day one, staying lean is a huge challenge.

Watch the original talk: Scaling at full speed by Tanja Lau