Wilson Wong

The one way is to have meetings and report regularly. The new way is to have an instant messenger group, no matter whatsapp, discord, teams, whatever the team likes to use and addit to it as part of their everyday work. This is more effective and can push the progress.

Scientists or engineers also stick to their own work and ignore the importance to letting other people in the team to know their progress. Always tell your team about some good and bad findings. This helps to build the habit of communication and encourages sharing of ideas.

In materials science, setting specifications is so important. All tasks, work flow, plans, objectives all built for meeting specifications of the materials. So make sure the team agrees on the specifications first. Then, plan it, break it into milestones and KPIs.

For big team, each person has a specific role. In small team, each person has multiple roles. Or in some cases some tasks are shared among a few members of the team. Defining roles can help building accountability, however, it is not always healthy to the team. The team should communicate well, understand the difficulties of each member of the team. Instead of holding people responsible for any failure, it is better to have the team joining hands to help on critical problem. Role is like in-charge of communication of specific task, not in-charge of 100% accountability.

Materials science is a mix of many different subtopics. Depending on the objectives, different people should be picked. Questions to ask, how broad (number of skills needed) and how deep (how much experience is needed for each skill). However, in the reality, resource is limited, so have to squeeze the most out of the existing team or ask for (free) advices or directions elsewhere if you have no more money to spend on this project.

It depends a lot on the type of startup and the scale of startup. If it is just a small one with little investment, it doesn't actually matter how many people in the board and who they are. Only if the startup is big enough with external investors or if it is a spin-off from universities, you may have to put the investor representatives and the university representatives in the board. Just have to make sure the founders are still having more voting power to protect yourself. Putting university representative in the board is solely for marketing purpose though.