Paul Gollash, the founder and CEO of Voxy, just came and spoke at our NYC Lean Startup meetup, and I wanted to share some of his stories. These notes are from my memory, but hopefully reasonably accurate. Voxy is a language learning startup that is around 2 years old, VC-backed and has grown to about 25 people. But at the …
A Guide to Lean Product Management
In my previous post, I said that teams need to stop shipping features and focus on creating value. I promised a tactical view of how an existing organization (i.e. not a ground-floor startup) could bring about that change. I will start with a little tl:dr summary: 10 Characteristics of a Lean* product team: you are composed of small, goal-driven, cross-functional …
Leveling up a product organization
Too many product teams are stuck in a mish-mash of waterfall and agile. And even amongst agile dev teams, it is time they leveled up from agile 1.0. A waterfall/agile mish-mash is where the dev team attempts to be agile, but the business thinks in waterfall terms with feature roadmaps, time-based estimates, and time-based deadlines. What do I mean by …
Innovation teams need generalists
Startups need execution-oriented, “whatever it takes” generalists. After my talk at the AgileUX conference a few months ago, a soon-to-be entrepreneur came up to me explaining their intent to hire the best UX, best visual designer, best copywriter, best SEO person, best node.js person, etc etc and put it all together to make magic. Because it’s all about team right? …
Pair interviewing isn’t just for devs, it’s also great for UX and product
I just wound down a project where I spent 6 months working hand-in-hand with Pivotal Labs, the respected agile/XP dev shop. It was a fabulous experience that had a strong impact on how I think about product development (more on that later). It also has changed how I interview product and UX people. Pivotal helped our mutual client interview developer …
Tips for low-volume A/B testing
I tweeted about low-volume A/B testing the other day, and wanted to share a few thoughts. I spent a few minutes talking to Hiten Shah (CEO of KISSMetrics) on the phone, who probably knows as much about A/B testing as anyone out there. He passed on three tips that I wanted to share here: 1. only do one variation at a time …
Startups: it’s not all coding and design
I’m starting a band. I can’t really play any instrument or sing, so I’m looking for a few musical co-founders. — Tweet by @Greenberg A ton of people retweeted the above note. It’s a great zinger aimed at folks who can’t build digital products trying to start digital products companies. After the initial chuckle, I couldn’t help but examine it …
Best birthday present ever
This year I turned 40. To celebrate I disappeared into the Catskills for a private hackathon with a few close friends. Playing in the mud, making stuff — it was the best birthday present I could have asked for. Aging is a funny thing. Some people get stuck in a rut. I feel like my learning and creativity is only increasing. …
Highlights from Andreessen’s Stanford CS183 talk
I would imagine that by now most of you have discovered Blake Masters’ notes from his Stanford class with Peter Thiel. In class 10, Marc Andreessen was the guest speaker and there were a number of gems in Blake’s write-up that I particularly wanted to highlight and in a few cases comment upon. Mark Andreessen: It’s hard; entrepreneurs are congenitally …
Not being live means flying blind
From Roger Ehrenberg at IA Ventures, an influential early stage VC in New York: “We are passionate about focus, especially at the earliest stages where distractions often mean not shipping software, and not shipping means not being close to customers and getting feedback, which essentially means flying blind. Once a start-up begins living in its head and not in the …