As CTO's become harder to find, the need for non-technical entrepreneurs to be able to communicate effectively with developers becomes more relevant. This is a guide meant to introduce the subject of project management for non-techies so that they have a good chance of expressing their vision accurately to their engineers.

1. PROJECT MANAGEMENT
FOR NON TECHIES
J A C O B O K O E N I G

2. PROJECT MANAGEMENT
FOR NON TECHIES
J A C O B O K O E N I G

3. THE MOST
IMPORTANT THING
WHY PROJECT MANAGEMENT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE
If you’re a non-technical entrepreneur, and are thinking of hiring
developers directly to develop an early version of your idea, stop
and read. This is for you!
In the ideal world, you have enough funding to hire a proper CTO,
and a project manager with experience to convey your expecta-
tions, create daily and weekly reports on production, and structure
a well organised plan with budgets and timelines for the develop-
ment of your app. But if you’re here, one might assume, it's precise-
ly because you don’t have a product yet, and therefore no funding.
Competent CTO’s, you’ll understand if you’ve been looking around
for a bit, shy away from equity-only deals, and so it comes full circle
- No funding, no CTO, no product, no funding (ad infinitum).
How then, do you use your resources to create something with
which to start gaining traction with early investors (such as family
and friends, and pre-seed investors) and maybe even a few clients?
If you’re brave (or desperate) enough, you hire developers directly
and face a huge challenge: How to convey your vision properly, so
that developers know exactly what to quote, how to estimate
development times, and how do you ensure they don’t disappear
for three months only to come back to you with a product that is
not at all close to what you asked for in the first place. Read on...

4. WHO ARE MY
DEVELOPERS?
IN SHORT PEOPLE WHO TRY THERE BEST TO ACHIEVE
YOUR VISION, AS LONG AS THEY UNDERSTAND IT PROPERLY
Whether you’re hiring someone local, offshoring or [God help you] using
a freelancer site, the most common story behind your developer is that
she/he is a well-intentioned, average to kinda-good developer who will
try to achieve the best outcome possible as she/he understands it. Most
freelancers will be either not very good at project management, or feel is
not part of their job description, and thus, they will tend to focus on their
development work to the exclusion of crucial things like updating you on
key milestones in development, or asking important questions they have
about your project.
Because their incentives are very different to yours, it can follow that they
are preoccupied with doing things as fast as possible and exactly as you
requested, while you are thinking about why a user would do things in a
particular way and how can their experience be optimized. Therefore,
when unforeseen challenges arise, they can choose a solution that is
close to “what the client asked for” while you would, if asked, choose a
solution that is more coherent with your vision for the user experience.
And generally speaking, the average developer won’t stop developing to
ask you about these things when they come up.
The solution to this, is a well organised project management system that
slightly forces developers to get out of their routine, report back to you
and ask important questions. Read on…

5. THE SYSTEM
OVERVIEW
WHAT WE REVIEW ON THIS DOCUMENT
BEFORE YOU START TASK ASSIGNMENTREPORTING
What you need before you
start.
The best tool for Project
Management Beginners
Owning the project
Sprints
Daily and Weekly Meetings
How create detailed tasks,
acceptance criteria, and
assigned developers.
Prioritisation
Moving tasks and project
forward

6. BEFORE YOU
START

7. BEFORE YOU
START
The full design of the app before development, since
it’s much easier to make changes in design than in
developemn. If you can’t procure design in time,
then:
A rough draft of the screens with a workable flow of
how they interact with each other should be good
enough.
Often developers will quote on the general
scope of a project without enough information
about the project. It’s in your best interest to
avoid miscommunication by having as much
clarity as possible on how the project should
look and feel like at the end of the job. Really
good things to have are:
HAVING ENOUGH RESOURCES TO GET
AN ACCURATE QUOTE
User stories
Some things are not clear in design, but
important nonetheless. In those cases,
user stories come in as a full explanation
of the app from the perspective of the
different type of users. Two examples of
user stories are:
“As a guest user, I would like to see the
latest news in my home to explore the
app without signing up” or “As an admin,
I would like to be able to change how
many posts each type of user sees in their
feed to make sure they are never over-
loaded with content.

8. PLANNING YOUR
PROJECT USING
TRELLO
Trello is a project management tool that
uses the Kanban methodology to sched-
ule tasks into cards that can be placed
into custom columns to organise and
tackle them in order. It is incredibly easy
to use, and it allows for as much flexibili-
ty as you need while you become more
proficient in project management. In
the following pages, I will show you how
to adapt trello to an app development
project. It would be great if you took a
couple of minutes to sign up and get
familiar with the interface.
SIGN UP and get familiar
with the interface.

9. SOME OF TRELLO'S
MAIN COMPONENTS
Columns:
Trello's main category component which
contains the tasks cards
Cards:
The main representative of a functionality
or main task. It includes details in the
form of the following components:
Description:
The main component of each card. It
should contain an overview of the
functionality in its card.
Checklists:
A simple to-do inside of cards, best used
for acceptance criteria that define when
a functionality can be deemed complete.
Labels:
Tags to categorize your cards beyond the
main column category.
Activity and Comments:
A component that allows you to separate
conversations about each specific
functionality.
Labels
LABELS
Current Sprint
Upcoming Sprint
Future Sprint (Date TBD)
Create a new label
Enable color blind friendly mode
Search Labels....
Labels Checklist
Description
Columns
Activity & Comments
Due Date
Cards
Onboarding
Anonymous User flow
Forgot Password doesn’t work
Log In Flow
Jul 28 1/44
Register Flow
Jul 28 1/44
Jul 28
Log In Flow
Jul 28 1/44

10. TASK
ASSIGNMENT

11. CREATING A
DETAILED
PLAN IN TRELLO
This is the core of this
document. We will discuss
in a simplified manner, how
a lot of project management
professionals plan their
project, and create details
for each task.

12. COLUMNS, CARDS
AND ACCEPTANCE
CRITERIA On a given app development project, there
are three main hierarchical components to
keep in mind: Columns represent the main
modules or sections of your app like Login,
Onboarding, Newsfeed, Profile, etc. Cards
represent each functionality inside the
module or column. Things like filtering con-
tent by date, name and tag, or ability to
search are examples of functionalities that
could be inside of the newsfeed module.
Lastly, acceptance criteria are important de-
tails about those functionalities without
which tasks are not complete. For example,
you might consider curcial that the pass-
word has at least one uppercase letter in the
login form, or that news older than a week
should not be initially loaded. These are ex-
amples of acceptance criteria and should go
on a checklist inside of each card
Share my Concept
Design
Jul 28

13. The way you will create cards in Trello fol-
lows the following format: Columns, from
left to right, represent how the user flows
through the app, for example: Logs in first,
then goes to the feed, then creates a post,
etc..
Cards are stacked from top to bottom
based on their priority. If a developer can
take only one, he will take the one on the
top of any column he happens to be work-
ing with.
For milestones, you would normally draw a
line that zigzags over and under the cards
creating sections that represent mile-
stones. (Since trello doesn’t draw lines, we
use colored labels). A good rule of thumb
is to create three milestones representing
the absolute basic things you app need to
operate (on top - Orange), important
functionalities (in the middle - Purple),
and nice-to-haves (at the bottom - Red).
PRIORITIES
USER FLOW
MILESTONE

14. MOVING THE
PROJECT FORWARD
To move the project forward, the
main thing to do is to assign all
tasks to a developer, or allow
developers to assign them to them-
selves and mark the deadline and
progress of each one.
Although not precisely part of the
Kanban methodology, my team
likes to reserve four columns at the
beginning of the board to move
cards as they progress through the
flow: TO DO, IN PROGRESS, QA,
DONE.
As the team starts working on each
task, they will move cards all the way
to QA or DONE (depending on who’s
doing the check ups), after which it is
your job to confirm they are done and
mark them complete. Often, developers
will give you a staging site or app from
where to test these tasks.

15. REPORTING

16. MAKING SURE
THE PROJECT IS ON
RIGHT TRACK
To do this, we establish a
series of meetings around
weekly sprints of work that fits
as many tasks as can be
optimally achieved. Reports
then, are given by the team
on a daily, weekly, and
milestone basis.

17. REPORTING
Reporting is probably the most important part, but the one that is most often
neglected as everybody gets deeper into their work. That is why we make a point
of scheduling in the diary three main types of meetings.
Daily Meeting
The purpose of this meeting is for
each developer to talk about what
they did the previous day, what
they will do the day after, and
what resources or answer they
need to proceed.
To be able to keep the team
engaged with daily meetings, it is
very important that these don’t
last more than 15 minutes.
A good rule some people apply is
to have them while standing, if you
get tired, that means the meeting
has been too long.
Weekly Meeting
Although this comes from a
different methodology that is
beyond the scope of this
document (SCRUM), we like to
divide work into weekly sprints
and have a meeting at the end of
each, beginning of the next.
This is a much more in-depth
meeting in which functionalities
are discussed with the team to
make sure everyone is on the same
page before development. Tasks
are also assigned during this meet-
ing considering that all
resources and prerequisite tasks
needed for each are available.
Milestone Meeting
After each milestone a presenta-
tion should be arranged by your
developers to go through the
whole user flow and ensure that
what was developed is in line with
what was asked for (based on the
design, and instructions).
1 2 3

18. WRAPPING UP
Project Management is not easy, and my intention is not to
oversimplify the complexities of the job or make it sound
redundant. If possible, you should hire a professional to
handle the work.
However, the stage in which most early startups find them-
selves makes it very hard to hire before you have achieved
some sort of traction, and therefore, entrepreneurs have to
do a lot of the work themselves. This document is meant to
give you a basic understanding of what is most important
and allow you to work your way into the stage where you can
hire appropriate product professionals.
I would love to hear your thoughts, comments and success
stories after reading this. If you have any questions, feel free
to reach out to talk them over. Best of luck with your startup,
we’re eager to see how you make an impact!
hello@binarymango.com
+44 7305765518
www.binarymango.com