Proposal: An Open-Source Startup Reference Build

[Ted Henry]

I really appreciate the post @Peggy Graham put together showing how Atlassian tools actually work together. Could this idea be taken further to create a complete reference build for startups? 

I wonder how many of us have had an opportunity to really see and understand what the state-of-the-art really looks like.  Or could look like.  Would anyone be interested to collaborate on a community-driven, complete and open-source model for startups?

Atlassian team - is this something you would support?

[Komal Jain]

Interesting, I would love to (komal1203jain@gmail.com)

[Ted Henry]

Here's what I've started to do on my own, but would prefer to do with a group.  BTW, I am assuming something like this doesn't already exist...

I started with a straw man use-case that I could use to run end-to-end through an integrated ecosystem like @Peggy Graham shows.  Let's say I have an insight about some problem I can solve with an App, and I believe it will go viral overnight.  This scope is small enough for a half-pizza and some sticky notes, but because I expect to scale so rapidly I'd prefer to just onboard to a functional ecosystem from the very start, even if it's really opinionated.  SAFe/Jira Align can do this, but is pretty heavyweight for a startup. What else is there?  I decided to try to build my own.

Incidentally, I started with strategic planning and writing and modeling OKRs as I'd like to later track progress against them.  This has been interesting.  It has forced me to think about how to integrate Atlas, JPD, and Jira to support the views I'd want and the data I'd need to create them.

I'd find it helpful to collaborate with others who'd like to try this too. Depending on interest, there are probably a number of ways that this could work.

[Peggy Graham]

This sounds like a very cool project!  I wasn't sure, were you thinking of setting up the site with demo data, to be a hands-on sandbox or were you thinking it could showcase live, open-source projects and you could see the work happening for real?

It's a great idea either way, and would let you get hands-on versus watching a demo...  I'd be interested in helping, if I can...

[Ted Henry]

Hi @Peggy Graham I was thinking it could showcase live, open-source projects and you could see the work happening for real.  I want to build and deploy App that's real *enough* - for example, I'd like to build real deployment pipelines - but what it actually does isn't really important.

Ideally, I'd love to see an open-source community-owned ecosystem architecture that could be somehow be deployed in a site.  So press a button to set up projects, fields, workflows, automations, page templates etc. and onboarding documentation.

I will give this some more thought and reply again.  In the meantime, I welcome any thoughts and suggestions.

[Komal Jain]

I would like to help.

[Ted Henry]

Checking back in on this.  I’ve some progress and am working on sharing everything publicly.  I will check back in with a link to a page describing an open-source project concept in a week or so.

[Komal Jain]

Ok, let me know what further action or steps is required from my end

[Ted Henry]

Hi @Komal Jain and @Peggy Graham and anyone else who might be interested.

To bootstrap, I started by working on set of goals for this project and modeling them as outcome-focused OKRs. This was harder than I expected.  Especially if you're steeped in a "project" mindset, this takes practice to get right.

And It's important to get this right since the primary goal of this project is to demonstrate the magic that happens when you're product-focused and you've aligned your ideas, teams, and work to outcome-focused goals.

Not incidentally, I can already see people that have never done this before blowing right past this part because they don't know to think this way.  Nothing like a real-world scenario to make certain things clear...

I've created a README with all the details here. I'm updating everything as I go.  There are a number of ways to participate or simply show support.  I welcome your feedback.