Welcome. Here’s our story.

Going Global (Beta) is the story around a project we’re working on at Made by Many.

We’ve joined forces with several industry players including UK Technology and UKTI to solve a problem:

How do you help UK-based SMEs, specifically tech companies, get to international markets faster and with a greater chance of success?

How, indeed…

We took this project on in early October. We began by asking UK-based tech SMEs — the people we hope will use and benefit from the service we build — to tell us about how they internationalise: the steps they take, the challenges they face and, in retrospect, the things they wish they had known.

These discussions have played out in person, over the phone, and in the LinkedIn group we created, UK Technology Global Markets. They have resulted in some really human, unexpected insights into internationalisation (more on those later).

Just over a month in, we’re getting close to the end of our visioning process and we’re confident we’ve got a service candidate that will make a real difference to SMEs.

Doing it the agile way

Now that the vision is just about set (more on that later), the next steps are prototyping, design, development, and of course, a LOT of testing. As we’re working according to agile principles, we need to expect things will change as we go (new ideas, shifts in requirements, Acts of God) and we’ve got to be ready to adapt to these changes.

This blog is a window into how we’re getting on with this project. We’re throwing the shutters wide open with a real-time, insider’s view on this project… every bit of it.

Feeling a little bit naked

Naturally, our blog is open to everyone, but we think or at least *hope* that it might be of particular interest to product managers, designers, planners, developers and agile buffs. It’s an agile experiment, performed in full view of anyone who cares to look.

Why bother? Well, we think that doing this in a really transparent, accountable way will help us deliver a better project.

So welcome to The Story Of, told as honestly as we can tell it. Stay tuned and tell us what you think, and if you want the other side of the story, join our LinkedIn group and listen to what our customers are saying.

We’re also on Twitter @GoingGlobalBeta