I had a great idea for a feature in the early days of CloudHealth: enabling customers to collaborate around their cloud resources. For example, a manager might want to let their DevOps engineer know they forgot to “turn the lights
Product Management
About product management
The Importance of the M in MVP
One of my early Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) in the founding of CloudHealth Technologies was to test the value proposition of cloud cost optimization. I needed to validate two critical assumptions to my product idea: (1) I could drive a
The Importance of Cycle Time in Build-Measure-Learn Loops
The Lean Startup movement popularized the concept of Build-Measure-Learn (BML) as a means to reduce the risk of the creation of new products and businesses. The concept is simple: build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), measure the product’s effectiveness
What I Learned Starting a Company
October is the two year anniversary of the acquisition of my company, CloudHealth Technologies, by VMware. CloudHealth as a private company was definitely a labor of love for me, starting with the irrational decision to leave my job with two
My 1st Lesson In Incremental Delivery
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,
Iterating In the Presence of Customers
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