At the start of mentoring an entrepreneurship class the other day, I realized: “This group has no consensus or specificity around their belief system.” If you don’t know what you believe, how can you check if you are right? Working blindly leads to working harder, not smarter. There are lots of ways to get specificity and shared understanding around your belief system, …
A Piece of Advice for Junior Product Managers
I was in a discussion with a group of experienced product managers and someone asked, “What’s the best piece of advice you could give a junior PM?” My first response was, “Surround yourself with people smarter than you, and push appropriate decisions to them (while not chickening out on the hard decisions you need to make).” But I realized that …
Lessons from a Restaurant Kitchen
The world around us is full of inspiration. I was reminded of this last night when I ate at Cockscomb, one of my now-favorite places in San Francisco. Unlike my last visitation, I was alone. Thus I found myself eating at the bar, watching an incredible orchestra perform in front of me in their open kitchen. I couldn’t help but …
Planning Poker for Innovation Ideas
I’m currently in the middle of a project where we are helping a large company test out an innovation lab based on the “innovation studio” ideas. We are now in week 4. The beginning of the project was focused on learning, tons of custdev, and ideation. We’ve winnowed down our ideas to 6, and need to choose our first prototype to test …
The Tyranny of Shareholder Returns
When Hillary Clinton recently took aim at hit-and-run activist investors, hedge-funder Donald Drapkin retorted that “Management forgets that shareholders own the company.” This is legally true, but conceptually problematic. Short term investors really own an abstract object, which I’ll call a chit. They think the chit will go up or down, and they either invest or short accordingly. They don’t …
Playdoh and Silly Putty
Why do we like working with our hands so much? What is it about making something tactile, that gets the brain engaged? Whenever there is a complex decision to be made, and usually nothing is more hairy than prioritization debates, I like writing things out on index cards (one item per card, bonus if I have time to draw icons …
Introvert Entrepreneurs and External Affirmation
The Wall St. Journal published a piece today on “Why Introverts Make Great Entrepreneurs.” There are a lot of interesting points, but one section got a rise out of me. “They don’t need external affirmation,” the piece reads. “They generally don’t look for people to tell them whether an idea is worth pursuing. They tend to think it through before …
Custdev: Starting with First Principles
On Friday morning, I popped over to Frank Rimalovski and Lindsay Gray’s always-impressive startup class at NYU‘s Entrepreneurial Institute to talk about vetting new ideas. Afterwards, one team asked the classic question, “if I shouldn’t ask speculative questions, and yet my product isn’t ready to test, how can I do customer development?” In their case, they had an interesting scientific breakthrough …
Landing Page Tests Aren’t Useful for Validation
A few years ago, I wrote about the Truth Curve, and refined those thoughts later in Talking to Humans. Essentially it states that the believability of information you receive from market tests increases as the fidelity of your product test increases. You should not wait until you have a live, instrumented product in the market, but nor should you take …
Upside and Downside
Heidi Roizen has yet another great post this week: “How to Build a Unicorn from Scratch – and Walk Away With Nothing.” Every budding entrepreneur should read it. Her post isn’t just about valuations and terms. It is also about thinking through downside. In frothy times, especially when equity starts to feel more valuable than cash (a condition not yet reached …