Posts for "Product Management"

Early in my career I worked on a new service called Venues at an MIT Media Labs spinout called FireFly. The service was an early version of a social network like MySpace that was focused on engaging consumers in chat, message boards, and content around user-driven topics. I poured my

I re-listened to Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale episode 4 (Imperfect Is Perfect) on the walk from the office to North Station last night. This episode highlights the criticality of putting your product in front of customers early and often. The topic is an obvious one for Reid, who

The Lean movement has made everyone aware of the importance of a feedback loop in driving the success of businesses, products and features. By driving tight and iterative Build-Measure-Learn loops, organizations can limit the risk of their investments and not overcommit resources toward initiatives that either fail or do not

I grabbed lunch with a well respected entrepreneur / investor on my trip to the Silicon Valley last week. One of the topics we discussed has been on my mind for the last couple years: should startups drive their product strategies more like Apple or Amazon? The Apple versus Amazon debate

I like to think that if software development had Ten Commandments, the first would be: Thou shalt not build something that doesn’t matter. There is no more profound waste of talent and effort than to have engineers build software that doesn’t get used by customers, or add-value elsewhere

I’m not a big fan of competitive analysis. While I generally know the high-level value of different products in a market, you’re unlikely to find me taking a deep dive into a competitive product. This is a change from a decade ago, when I was convinced a key

While sprint planning is an important activity for any software development organization, it takes on a new level of criticality in a startup. A good sprint planning process can improve the likelihood for success of a young company; a bad one can directly contribute to its failure. So I’m

I like to think I’m an Agile Pragmatist in a world of Agile Fundamentalists. I believe there is no single framework / process that is a panacea to the various issues within a software development organization, and instead processes must be adapted to fit the specific needs of a business,

I had beers last night with an engineer that in the not too distant future will likely be joining the ranks of Boston entrepreneurs. He is currently a mid/senior-level engineer at a small Boson startup that has been struggling of late. Like any good startup engineer, he volunteered to

Below are my ten commandments for startup product management. I’ll confess to having worked with too many PMs who violated a number of these commandments - and possibly a few that violated them all. Thou shalt not try to product manage in a market for which thou is not

I had the good fortune of cutting my teeth in the first Scrum team, back at the end of the dark ages of waterfall software development. With all the innovations we pioneered in those days - e.g. cross-functional teams, daily standups, iterative development - we still struggled with how

"Many companies get the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people here’s this great idea then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is

My last year at a Fortune 100 tech company, I did a fair amount of technical due diligence in support of M&A activities. In this role, I would fly into a company for a couple days to assess the value / risks of their product, technology, people and process.

Years ago I was running a development team for a systems management startup. Several of the prospective customers required software agents to run on their servers, and our solution was still months from release. One week a talented SE in the company decided to take it upon himself to solve

Over my years in startups, I’ve found the single hardest role to fill with a quality candidate is product management. Ask any industry professional to name the best software developers they have worked with, and they will have at least a few names to share. But ask the same

Last summer I reread Lean Startup in search of advice on how to run a lean experiment for a B2B business. In rereading, I realized the book’s near exclusive focus on consumer startups (e.g. IMVU, Zappos, Dropbox, Grockit). Unfortunately stories of A-B testing on consumer websites was of

For the last couple months I’ve been researching a business opportunity using a Lean Startup process. If it’s true that we learn best from our mistakes, I’ve done some really solid learning over the last several weeks. ;) I had previously posted 9 Tips To Improving Your Lean

When I changed from being a startup executive to an EIR at a venture capital firm, I didn’t realize how ill equipped I was for my most important task: market validation. I had a general idea of where where I wanted to start a business, and some good direct

This last fall we received the next iteration in lean with Eric Ries’s new book, Lean Startup. If you are not already familiar with lean startup thinking, it is an approach to reducing risk in new business ventures by identifying and testing the assumptions required for business success. The

Last week I had an opportunity to guest lecture at the University of Massachusetts Boston in their Venture Development Center. The class consisted of students who were actively launching new businesses, with products that ranged from green surf boards to African-inspired dresses. Below is a slightly shortened version of my

Bill Brown was one at my last startup. He was the CTO of a VAR turned MSP in South Carolina that had spent his entire professional career in IT. When we found him, he had already cobbled together parts of a solution that for all intents and purposes had the