Team growth: welcoming our new team member
Oh, a fresh insight? Van Anh, our intern with a background in health technology, you have the floor!
Every startup has its own unique set of challenges and problems. By knowing the challenges and having an idea of how to overcome them, we can get a better chance of beating the odds to make our startup a success. The road to success is absolutely not straight, we have had to make every effort to reach our goal.
My name is Van Anh and I am doing my master’s degree in healthcare technology at Tallinn University of Technology. During my summer internship, I work in the marketing field and take over the social media as a new member of Triumf Health. It is both a challenge and an opportunity for me. The biggest challenge so far for me has been to work with Twitter for the first time. Thanks to the kind help from Kadri, Anna and Riin, I can quickly get acquainted with the new job. The more I work with it, the more I am interested, especially in building an engaged and enthusiastic community.
But now, let’s get to know my new family by a small interview to see what challenges they have had to overcome to nourish and protect our precious child, Triumf Health.
It was interesting for me to see that our CEO Kadri, Lead Developer Leandro and Engagement Officer Riin all had more or less the same struggles. Kadri said that for her the key issue has been the balance between effectiveness and attractiveness. And as much as she would like to focus on the effectiveness with her research background, she agrees that the game needs to be engaging and fun first. And that has been the main struggle for Leandro as well in addition to dealing with the engine limitations. He said that sometimes something that was supposed to be fast ends up taking a lot of work cause there is no an "easy" way to solve it in the platform we are working. Moreover, during the constant growth of the game, the bigger it gets, the weirdest bugs always appear. Riin agreed with these points and added that these struggles with the research based content have been a great learning process towards something great.
Other team members had different view on their struggles depending on their background. Our researcher Anna and lead investor Mait pointed out time limitations. As Anna is a new mom, she has had to adjust to her new life situation and Mait is full time employed elsewhere so can contribute only during his spare time. Then again the developments at the startup are so quick and intense that sometimes it feels overwhelming. Our CTO Jose (Pepi) also said from the timetable perspective that it has been difficult to estimate the working times realistically because of the uncertainties that working with diverse technologies bring as these are evolving constantly. In addition, while coding – as a creative work – it has beenwas very common to get stuck in solving problems for many hours or even days! By that time, it becomes became helpful to put it aside for a while and come back later, or even discussing with other developers to have a different point of view.
In the perspective of a narrative designer on the Triumf game, Georgi found that it was not easy to reach sick children auditory and to keep their interest. However, his experience as a writer, the support that he received from other team members and their knowledge about this specific target group help him to overcome the difficulties.
The last team member I interviewed was Risto As a product manager, he thought that the biggest challenge for him has to be related to the wide selection of tasks he needed to handle on daily basis. He said that usually goes in a way that as soon as he gets comfortable with a task, he has to switch to completely different ones (and sometimes never return to the tasks that started to grow on him). He also mentioned the bigger challenge in his life when working at Triumf Health: “It has been such a learning experience but I guess this is what you get if you are married to the CEO with whom you have a startup child together.”
To sum up, I believe that each of us has problems or challenges to overcome every day. But by working together, we overcome these obstacles! We promise to continue giving our very best in order to reach our common Triumf Health goal of helping ill children.