Hugh Sheehy

This is comparatively easy...though some people will hate the approach. It's called Dollar-Driven-Development. If there are conflicting priorities, someone is behind the needs. So get the various people or parts of the business to bid into the IT Team. "How much will you pay the IT team to build the feature or to deliver the requirement?" Behind all the normal guff about strategic prioritization, there's either a real need or not. If there's a real need, they'll pay to have the need addressed. Simples. And yeah - some people will hate it.

There are fundamentally two types of work in data analytics. 1. You know what you're looking for. So start at what you want to present to the client and build your plan from there back to now. Clear deliverables, clear timelines, clear commitment to the client. 2. You don't know what you're looking for. This is often the most valuable because if you find something in the data it could be really important. But you need to get the client to understand this type of work BEFORE YOU START and the client needs to want to do it. If the client gets the idea, report and discuss openly on a regular basis.

It sounds as if people are talking gobbledegook to each other. They're using technical jargon rather than plain language. So first, get everyone to sit together and explain what they're saying in plain language. If they can't do that there's no point them doing a lot of work on data analytics that they'll then be unable to explain to the business or client anyway. Insist. Simple terms.

The key item of the vision should include - above all else - one key goal. The technology you pick should be one that will "Just bloody work". Mess around with fancy words all you like after that. But don't skip it.

When is a VC bearing 100% of the risk?

While it's often hard to define what terms like "Minimum Viable Product" mean in practice, it's comparatively easy to define what the needs for the tech stack are in an entrepreneurial context. THE ABSOLUTE MINIMUM that'll do the job. The ABSOLUTE minimum. The simplest, quickest, easiest thing you can make work. You can always fix technical debt later, if the business idea can scale. You can't fix wasted time or money later. Particularly time.