It’s easy for the product team to to fixate on the core technology that enables a product and lose sight of what’s needed for the “whole product.” This article is the result of an ongoing collaboration with Mary Sorber that started with her metaphor that raw pasta is not enough [...]
In “The Dance of the Possible,” Scott Berkun outlines four tests for understanding the real work involved to translate observations and creative insight into a solution. […]
Design your MVP in two weeks to avoid adding unnecessary features and complexity to your offering. A two-week time box forces you to focus on essentials. […]
It’s useful to explore several paths in parallel and have a default list of pivots ready of your first few efforts don’t bear fruit. […]
In February 2010 Derek Sivers gave a great talk on “How to Start a Movement” that offered some important tips for leaders and but offered the surprising conclusion that concluded that the most important and underappreciated key to a successful movement was the follower’s courage to follow and ability to [...]
Applications that improve knowledge worker productivity have to satisfy “prepared users” not “casual users” and are especially challenge to do customer discovery and development for. With his permission, I have included William Pietri (LinkedIn williampietri) answer to a real question from an early stage entrepreneur because I found it incredibly [...]
An infographic with some key questions to consider when developing a new product. Originally suggested in “Breakthrough Thinking From Inside the Box” by Coyne, Clifford, and Dye in HBR December 2007. […]
Frank Robinson’s Minimum Viable Product (MVP) concept as first articulated in 2001. An MVP is the result of product development and customer development proceeding in parallel, which Frank Robinson called “synchronous development.” […]
One documentary worth watching to get some context on the history of entrepreneurship and venture capital is “Something Ventured.” It’s a series of interviews with venture capitalists talking about their investments and their risk mitigation strategies in the 1950’s through 1970’s. It’s clear that they paid a lot of attention [...]
A common mistake technical entrepreneurs can make is to focus on what’s easy to build, and enter a market with dozens of competitors without thought to differentiation. Or to hope that by making it “free” they can make money by selling ads. […]
Javid Jamae (@JavidJamae) is a Principal Engineer at Tout, where he heads up the experimentation and growth efforts; he leads a team focused on growing the viewership for both local and nationally syndicated content. Javid authored this great guest post on finding early adopters through customer interviews before building a minimum viable [...]
Q: I am preparing to launch a website for my minimum viable product (MVP). It’s a few pages and has has some forms and a file upload capability. Potential customers will be able to explain a particular type of problem that they have and then upload some relevant files for [...]
In a candid discussion about the challenges of managing your own expectations for a minimum viable product (MVP), Tristan Kromer observed, "It's psychologically hard to enthusiastically proceed with skepticism." And that is the challenge, we have to be enthusiastic about our product ideas to persevere to complete them and tell others about [...]
Stripping the least useful third of the features requested allows you to deliver a 70 percent solution much more rapidly that’s often good enough. […]