OC1 and OC3 confusing

Stage 1
1

Ok long story short,

  1. Worked as an employee in 2 product led companies (currently still employed in 1 of them). The first one is now a corporate. Started off with 40 employees and now employs over 300 people. Was promoted to lead engineer and the product is pretty significant in the market and is still one of the flagship products of the firm. In my current job (a small startup started off with 3 employees and now over 20 in 2 years), I built two products as product head. Again we have significant revenue and tremendous growth. We also just landed our first investor.
  2. I have my own tech startup, it’s 1 year old and have significant engagement (over 37% of student population are active users from just 2 universities in Australia - it is a product for students - now slowly scaling to other cities and countries) -
  3. I am also at the speaker’s panel at the India’s central goverment’s MSME technology conference hosted at the capital. Over 2K people attend and I have been a speaker for the last two years.

Now I have documents to back up the above points - Here are some examples

  1. 3 manadatory LORs — from the CEO’s of the companies above and the director of a huge tech enterprise in the US who was an enterprise client for one of these products,
  2. employment contracts and high salary proof, registration certificates of my startup, stock options offered in my current employment,
  3. product screenshots, proof of all these products in market - these are all live and in production
  4. Google analytics, mongodb analytics reports signed off by the COO showing growth, revenue and traction (revenue in millions GBP)
  5. customer testimonials (big brands) who use our product, restaurant testimonials (big chains) - one of our B2B product caters to restaurants
  6. proof of a highly innovative product that competes with Alexa’s api as referenced in LOR’s, architectural digrams showing why the system is a top technology, internal explainer video created for the product and proof of product in market
  7. Github repos of all products, code commits, date of first commit etc showing my activity
  8. Asana task management screenshots showing how I manage a team of 20 developers building two products including the start date of my involment and nunber of tasks I have assigned
  9. Proof of speaking in the high tech panel

Here is my confusion:

  1. In MC1 - it states -
  • You led the growth of a product-led digital technology company, product or team inside a digital technology company, as evidenced by reference letter(s) from leading industry expert(s) describing your work, or as evidenced by news clippings, lines of code from public repos or similar evidence.
  • You led the marketing or business development at a product-led digital technology company, demonstrably enabling substantial revenue and/or customer growth or major commercial success, as evidenced by reference letter(s) from leading industry expert(s) describing your work, senior global commercial executives inside the company and/or at company partners/customers, or similar evidence.
  1. In OC1 - it states - prove your innovation
  2. In OC3 - it states - proove your impact

Now, for innovation they are asking for revenue reports, growth, traction etc - something along these lines
For impact they are asking for architecture diagrams and everything else is pretty vague

My Questions:
*1. Shouldn’t OC1 allow us to show documents which have been asked for OC3 and vice versa? I thought innovation is about technically proving that you’ve built some insane stuff and impact is about showing traction, growth, revenue etc but it seems to be the opposite here. *
2. Plus for MC1, they seem to be asking the same proof for OC1 & OC3 or should I just be pointing to the same evidences? Everything seems redundant. Any ideas?

2

Hi. I think you are mixing things up too. Don’t forget that technation.io is for both technical and business applicants. For OC3 technation gave some examples for technical and business applicants. For OC1 tech Nation described what is required, but it is limited. The list of evidence are not exhaustive, use the description as a guide. For Innovation you “If you are an employee working in a new digital field or concept, this must be clearly demonstrated, for example by providing a patent application (patent should include verifiable ID on Google Patents)”.

Generally, I think innovation is the most difficult to prove.

1 Like
3

Oh ok I understand it better when you point out that there are guidelines for business applicants as well. So I can probably show revenue and LORs for OC1 but impact has me confused. I do understand that impact means showing impact in the technology sector. Again, revenue, download statistics, orders processed are all redundant with innovation. But I get your point. These are just guidelines and that it can’t cover every scenario. Any advice on what I can use for OC1 and OC3 in the list of evidences I have mentioned? Would like to get your opinion or anyone reading this

4

Hey @Archid_Vignesh, Your profile looks very good.
I had similar questions about the document duplication across MC1, OCs while applying myself. It is my opinion that you refrain from talking about MC evidences in OC1 or OC3. That might give an impression that you dont have many evidences to show overall to qualify. For e.g, you are saying that you built two successfull products. So I would talk about the most successful one in MC and keep the other product evidence for OC3. The overall idea is that you have enough references to show across multiple criteria(s) to establish your talent.

Another point is that, while showing product evidences, it is defenitely a great add-on to show screenshots, customer testimonials, reports etc, but primarily make sure that the story also gives enough focus on your role in the product and provide evidences substantiating the same. So, I would talk about the product overall and show my commits or public references etc. quoting my name before going into the testimonials and other supporting evidences.

1 Like
5

Hi Sharath … thanks for taking the time to give your insights. Well yes although I can only prove those through my references along with code commits on github and probably screenshots of our team and all the task management workflows etc (we use Asana). Every other public references such as news clippings etc talks about the company and the CEO, so I guess it all depends on my LORs and SOP.

6

When in doubt — OC3 > OC1.