TKS Sessions 31/32: Moonshot 2 & 3

For these two sessions, I decided to combine them into one blog post because they are relatively similar. I wanted to wait until a little later in the week so I could give a nice full rundown on the stuff we’ve been doing for moonshots in one interesting post, right before the big presentation day this weekend.

For the past couple of sessions, there have been no velocity meetups, so we could focus exclusively on our moonshot projects, so we can be at our best for presentation day.

My intentions for these two sessions were to make as much progress as possible on our moonshot and treat this as seriously as possible to get the best results, and what that meant was meeting deadlines and providing what we considered high-quality work.

Throughout these two sessions, we had gone over multiple tools, mindsets, and strategies to consider when building our company moonshot, and I will share a lot of them with you here.

One of the things we had to do, which could be considered one of our most important deliverables, was the master plan article. Ours ended up being very detailed, around 45 minutes long, and it consisted of everything you needed to know about our product so that you could feel confident in investing in or using it, or even creating it yourself. Here are the main components these master plan articles should have to cover all the most important points:

1. Hook/problem

2. Current ways to solve the problem, and why they aren’t good

3. Your solution

   1. Technicals

   2. How it works

   3. Testimonials

4. Economics

5. Feasibility

   1. Possibility

   2. Timeline

6. Impact/goals

7. Team

We went into depth on each of these parts so we could communicate all the details of our product and have them right there for anyone to understand. Something we need to change in our article is the navigational part. Since it’s very long, it’s hard to find specific points, so we need to embed a table of contents to make it easier to navigate.

We also went over this thought experiment called the monkey and the pedestal. Basically, it goes like this:

You want to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare on a pedestal, where do you start: Designing the pedestal or training the monkey?

In this thought experiment, it’s basically asking you, do you do the hard part first, like training the monkey to recite poetry, or do the pretty stuff, like getting the pedestal so your monkey can practice on it? You would need to train the monkey first, because that’s where you find all the problems and the possible solutions, as well as understanding the timeline and actual feasibility of your task. If you do the pretty stuff first, like building the pedestal, you waste all this time creating something where the actual goal is still not feasible. You put the monkey on the pedestal, but can it do what it needs to do, which is recite the poetry?

So, we all needed to find the monkey of our moonshots. What is the thing or goal that we need to complete? What training do we need to do for this? Once we figure that out, we can start on it, then get on to designing and making things look pretty, which is the equivalent of building the pedestal.

To help do this, we had four questions we needed to answer:

1. Provide a one-liner concept of what you’re team is working on: This helps boil down your goal or idea into one simple, powerful concept that is easy to keep track of and understand.

2. Provide some detail on what problem you’re trying to solve/what opportunity you are trying to create: Now, we can get into more depth from that one-liner to dig deeper into the meaning and actual importance of what we are doing.

3. What is the monkey that you need to solve: After answering those first two questions, it’s easier to see what the “monkey” is for your product. What is the thing that you need to tackle and solve for everything else to flow and fall into place?

4. In your opinion, why is this a 10x solution to solving the problem: After going over not only what your product/solution is, but also what you’re monkey is, you can then explain and better understand why you’re idea is making the situation you are focusing on 10x better than it currently is, which is the goal of a moonshot.

We had looked at a new MotW, the mind of a CEO. What’s interesting about the mind of a CEO mindset is that it encompasses a lot of the mindsets we have already learned in TKS this year. A CEO needs to be able to perform at their best using multiple different mindsets to get the best results and drive progress forward. So, we had to choose three mindsets to embody and focus on the week before the moonshots challenge. The three I chose from this year were:

1. Figure it out: Just before the moonshot deadline, there were things that had to be done on time to make our moonshot the best and most professional, so we had to figure out the different last-minute problems that came up and overcome them to still find success.

2. High Standards: Because we really cared about our moonshot company, we had set high standards for everything we did for this moonshot in order to achieve the best results.

3. Done>Perfect: At the end of the day, it was important to know that we technically just started building out this company and moonshot, so not everything we say now or submit needs to be set in stone. We can eventually modify or make things better, but when we submitted, we just needed to make sure it was correct (so not telling lies) and was fully done.

The last tool we looked at throughout these two sessions to help us develop our moonshots was a revisit of the why, how, and what statements. Earlier in the year, we saw how companies and projects tend to start presenting or pitching themselves by sharing what they are doing, how they are doing it, and why they are doing it. But, to have the most connection with investors or customers/users is to go backwards, starting by sharing the why and ending on the what. People tend to forget the why when they are developing something new. There has to be a reason as to why you are choosing to do this thing, and that can sometimes get lost, so it’s important to acknowledge what the why is, share it with people, and make it a core value in what you’re doing to stay true to it. So, each of us in our groups shared our own personal why statement for our moonshot, and then together created a company why for the moonshot. This will help us in the presentations to form more compelling pitches as well as communicate a cohesive message throughout all our deliverables to have the most connection/impact for those reading them.

The rest of the two sessions were mainly development and work time for our moonshots, and it all led up to this weekend to present what we’ve been working on to a panel of judges, parents, and other people in the tech community. It’s going to be a really exciting event, and I’m really pumped to share my work alongside my team.