Dragon's Apprentice Challenge

The constraint was the whole exercise

Every team is handed the same hundred pounds. That is what makes it a real problem: you cannot win it by spending more than anybody else, and you cannot win it with an idea that only works at scale. A hundred pounds buys you one attempt at being wrong.

So the question stops being what would make the most money and becomes what can we actually run, with the people we have, in the time we have, more than once. That is a question about logistics rather than ambition, and I liked it immediately.

Three things that worked

A balloon race, an auction, and a milkshake stand. They are not one idea, they are three, and running three is the part I would defend. They fail differently: the race depends on selling ahead of the day, the auction depends entirely on what people donate, and the stand depends on footfall and on the weather. Any one of them could have gone badly without taking the total with it.

The stand also did something the other two could not, which was run repeatedly. An auction happens once. A stand can be set up again the following week with what you learnt the first time, and it is the only one of the three where we got to iterate.

A hundred pounds buys you one attempt at being wrong.

Why it is on an engineering page

Because it is the same job. Fixed budget, real deadline, a team who need to know what they are doing on the day, and a result you cannot argue with at the end because it is a number. The only difference between this and shipping software for a client is which units the number is in.

The creativity award is the part I would point at. Winning on takings alone would have said we found a good stall. Winning that as well says the shape of the thing was worth something, and shape is what I am usually being paid for now.