I went through an organization effort with the card game, and need to do that again for the fitness idea.  From a high level, the fitness idea is building technology tools to help people exercise more efficiently through education and workout apps.  This will have a different project plan and product roadmap than a physical product like a card game.  Some things like accounting and legal research will be similar, but other things like distribution will be different.  I don’t need Amazon Marketplace to sell this, but I will need more computing power and more complicated websites.

I will also need to write some documents.  The product roadmap for the card game was very simple; so simple in fact that I didn’t even bother writing it down – make some cards and a box… maybe make an expansion add on pack later.  Done.  Software is much different as it’s “never really done” and goes through many different versions.  Features can be added one at a time, and there are always new features that can be added.  These features need to be prioritized and will likely span many months to a few years in the future.

In addition to a product roadmap, a requirements document should be written.  A requirements document is designed to communicate how the software should work, feature by feature, and the acceptance criteria for when the feature is complete.  This requirements document should not be technical in nature, even though it’s about software.  The requirements document is really about communicating in layman’s terms how the software should work so that the technical people can then write architecture and technical requirements documents that will be used to define and execute on the technical work that needs to be done.

How does the theme of your startup change the way you are organizing?  What does your idea need that is different than what I’m working on?