12 hours seemed like an eternity but facing a real-life business challenge with my team made it fly by. I expected it would be boring, frustrating 12 hours. But the moment we dived into the challenge it ignited a surprising energy and those hours quickly disappeared very quickly and were filled with thrill and excitement till the very last moment. 

What is Hippoenabler? 

Hippoenabler is a digital tool to measure and improve your startup scaleup readiness. The tool combines a lot of multiple-choice question that helps you get intel about your startup so you can improve more. It creates two report External and Internal report. External Report helps to expand your high-trust network. Internal Report to improve your team alignment and scaleup readiness. (Oy, n.d.)

The Challenge

– It is a challenge to communicate about HippoMeter to busy startup founders and to make them realize and understand the benefits of it, right away and easily. ​

– All the startups in the world are not similar, so some kind of segmentation of the market would be necessary:​

–for finding the best target user groups for HippoMeter​

–for finding the best ways to do our marketing to them​

• ​

Key questions were: ​

• What kind of different startup groups there are?​
• What kind of marketing we should use? The tone of voice? Channels? Main messages? Look & feel?

Team Dynamics

How did we form a group and organize our team?

Before the challenge day, we sat for a team meeting after our paja and decided to select leaders and we also decided that instead of doing it one day we would actually divide 12 hours in two days. I think this was very helpful for us to work on, if we just worked on 12 hours straight everyone in the team would eventually burned out and we wouldn’t have achieved what we have now. 

After a discussion, we decided that managing a 14-member team with multiple groups might not be so easy, so that’s why we chose two leaders. One person will be the leader with a supporting leader. They were responsible for structuring work and creating groups and people had the freedom to choose which team they would work with. The team decided on the breaks and lunchtime, also leaders helped to organize all the work happening in different teams so each team could easily collaborate and work together if needed. 

Strengths and challenges within our teamwork
Our team is generally very diverse and we have people who are capable of a lot of things. I think this is one of the most valuable strengths of our team. We are very much organized with everything and we also have people with real-life experience too that helped us a lot during the challenging work.

Did leadership roles emerge naturally?

Everyone in our team knows about the ability of each other. So, it was very easy for everyone to decide which role would fit perfectly to whom. It was a very quick decision too. 

Solving the Problem

Steps that we took to address the challenge

In the first hour when we got the challenge, the leaders created 3-4 groups including Market Research, Offline Marketing, Online Marketing etc.

The research team was responsible for doing the market research of possible competitors of the tool and competitors analysis too. Based on those information we planned to work on the double diamond model for Hippoenabler.

Beginning of forming the group we decided to put responsibility for each group on one person from each group. We selected the sub-group leader based on their ability and strength. We have also had multiple checkpoints each day where we would come together and discuss what each team has been working on and moving forward what will be our steps. So, every team was very clear and on the same page about what was going on and what needed to be done next.

On the first day, we had laid out our solution for the whole challenge and we basically figured out everything, But we still had some confusion and a lot of questions for the business owner. so we decided to contact them and set up a meeting, luckily they were available on the same day and we got all the answers on a call that we needed to move ahead on the second day.

On the second day, we all now knew what needed to be done today. So everyone gave it their best and worked to finish the report. And we were done one hour before the deadline. The second day went pretty smoothly because we had a great go from the first and all the bumps were already passed.

After, we submitted our reports. We gave a little presentation infront of the owners. We discussed the problem and what would be our solution for that. We had a very brief presentation of the plans that we had created for them.

Finally, the time came for assessment, they were very elaborate with their point of view about our work. And we were very happy that they liked what we presented to them. 

New skills, knowledge, or insights gained from the challenge

Personally, my key learnings from this challenge were that this was my first work where I had to collaborate with more than 10 people. Also, the amount of work that we had done was something I was very happy with. Normally I had the impression that, when you have this amount of people working in a team, it will always be chaos. Kudos to the leaders, they handle everything very smoothly. 

Conclusion

The HippoEnabler challenge transformed my thinking about teamwork. Instead of the boring and frustrating experience I anticipated, I discovered how much I enjoy being part of a solution-driven team. I witnessed how effective leadership and a clear process can harness a diverse team’s strengths. This 12-hour journey has reinforced my belief that true collaboration yields better results than individual effort. This insight will shape how I approach future projects, both in my coursework and beyond.

References

Oy, H. (n.d.). HippoMeter – to supercharge your scaleup readiness. Hippo Enabler. Retrieved March 8, 2024, from https://www.hippoenabler.com/hippometer/