A Love Letter to Our Larger Clients: We Are Here to Run With You

A love letter to our larger clients: We are here to run with you

Overcoming 5 hurdles that are unique to larger companies vs startups

HappyFunCorp has over 10 years of experience designing and building software for startups and large businesses. Our Head of Technical Solutions, Aaron Brocken, lays out some learnings from working with large teams on more complex projects. — Ed.

The projects we take on often have fairly aggressive timelines. Even with ample preparation and onsite time with key stakeholders, not all obstacles can be cleared before starting the project. So, we learn how to jump over them.

Only so many things can be done in parallel and teams must always balance when it makes sense to work ahead and when it’s necessary to pump the brakes to make sure the foundation is solid. The goal is to make as much progress as possible while triaging issues that block particular work streams in order to help the entire team stay on schedule.

We work with all kinds of companies, from scrappy startups with lean teams and the ability move quickly to larger companies with vastly different challenges. Big companies may have plentiful resources and large interesting projects. However, they have to maneuver in a tricky and bureaucratic atmosphere with many projects and initiatives fighting for the attention of overlapping teams. Because of that, it can be hard staying unblocked when collaborating.

We wanted to share some strategies we use to identify potential blockers early and help the client stay ahead of them. If working with a startup is like running as fast as you can, working with a big company still means running fast, but also jumping hurdles firmly placed in the entire team’s path.

Hurdle 1: Big companies involve more stakeholders in internal decisions and reviews which can cause them to move more slowly than originally anticipated

This doesn’t mean that the project team can stop and wait (usually), it means we need to figure out how to push forward in spite of unforeseen delays.

There are several things we do to help keep pushing the project forward.

1. We raise issues early and often. Most times internal decision makers aren’t ignoring emails/slacks/calls on purpose, they are balancing several projects, of which we are only one. So, we like to do them a favor and remind them often so they don’t forget to follow up on an important task.


2. We make sure the team knows, by name, who is responsible for each task. If we are lucky to have a singular point of contact on the client side, we make sure they can at least verbalize who is responsible even if we aren’t talking directly to them. Too many issues get dropped because “Someone will take care of it.” I’ve got news for you. “Someone” doesn’t work there. That person needs a name.


3. We present possible solutions. The approach could be pumping the breaks on that feature, pushing forward under an assumption (and being clear what the risks are), or moving to a different feature with the clear illustration that it may impact the ability to demo etc.

Hurdle 2: Siloed departments

We have worked with teams comprised of several departments that rarely work together. We may also need them to communicate in ways that they are not used to.

We try and identify what department representatives need to speak to each other. If we have someone on the client side who is acting as a main point of contact, we arrange a meeting with them AND the specific individuals needed for a specific task.

It’s good to set up a call with the key players from each relevant department, and try and keep the call/meeting to around 4 people. We establish clear goals, just as we would for our team. I can’t tell you how many times I have quite literally introduced people at the SAME COMPANY! But we do what we have to do in order to get people communicating.

Hurdle 3: We aren’t the only project

We’ve worked with clients who were opening new stores, launching separate sites, undergoing huge marketing initiatives, supporting new inventory, all while re-platforming their site with us. And guess what –e are in need of resources on the client side that are allocated to some or all of these other projects. We can help mitigate against constrained resourcing by giving clear timelines and risks so that the client can better prioritize internally and figure out where their resources are needed with respect to timelines. It’s a puzzle that we and the client must solve together.

Hurdle 4: Legacy code but not necessarily legacy people

Large companies are large because they have been around a while and the same is true for their code-base and infrastructure. When working on an especially old project, many of the folks that had visibility into WHY and WHAT things are, have long since moved on. There may be whole areas of the application that current employees have never touched.

That’s okay. It’s common. We have to identify what these issues are as early as possible and how we may or may not have to interact with them. We then identify the best candidate to do some exploration & documentation. We will do a deep dive in a development environment to decipher what is actually happening with a part of an API, or it may require someone on the client’s team to do a little digging into an old piece of the system that people haven’t touched in years.

The most important goal is to identify what the unknowns are as soon as possible and what appetite for exploration the client may or may not have. We then put together a plan of attack that the client can prioritize in order to investigate possible paths forward and keep the team unblocked.

Hurdle 5: Pressure and late engagement from key stakeholders toward the end of the project

This is super common because we aren’t the only project. With larger companies, some of the key stakeholders may not have the time or desire to interface with a project until it is fairly well underway.

Usually, our main point of contact on the client side is the one that gets the brunt of all the “Why can’t we just do this thing too?” suggestions that should have really come much earlier. This puts our main point of contact in a difficult position. Someone that could ostensibly fire them, is saying “I need this thing”, and people internal to the company have varying levels of success walking them back from that ask.

Experienced Product/Project folks on the client side know how to get in front of that, and do some internal preparation for what they know they can expect from these less engaged, yet key stakeholders. Less experienced people usually are in need of a lot of support to help navigate that and we help as much as we can. Usually, the client point of contact goes into survival mode and is usually trying to save themselves from having an incredibly difficult conversation with someone who could make their life at the company very difficult.

So, we plan with them around what is possible, what is left, what is necessary, and what could be launched in a different phase. The most important thing is to have the client help us help them by having honest discourse about what is actually needed.

What’s the common thread?

Communication. We remind people more often than they need reminding. We remind them well in advance. Should we have to? No. Do we have to? Yes. Sending an email saying “I need this thing, or else we are going to be delayed 2 weeks.” and then showing them 6 weeks later that we sent an email, may make us right. But it doesn’t make us successful at delivering the product.

We identify the people that should be communicating, even if it means introducing people that work at that same company. We have small meetings with clear agendas in addition to the big ones that the client contact may require for their particular checklist. We do these things because we want clients to be successful.

Staying unblocked isn’t about doing just what we should do. It’s about doing what we have to.

Find out more about our team and the great work we do at HappyFunCorp.com