Bill Scott is the Senior Director of UI Engineering at PayPal, and he is in the middle of transforming Paypal from a bloated, slow beast to an agile, lean, learning team. His talk last week at QCon in NYC was awesome, and since the video is not yet up, I wanted to share my raw notes (emphasis below are my …
11 Customer Development Anti-Patterns
Update: check out my book on customer development Talking to Humans Steve Blank always liked to say, “In a startup, no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” The lean startup movement encourages that you get out of the building with a mixture of experiments and qualitative research. Doing qualitative work gives you several benefits. It helps you learn …
The Intrapreneur’s Team
Neo spends a lot of time working with large companies on new product innovation. One question we often get is how to best structure roles and teams. Here are a few high-level bullets: Senior Executive’s Role: define the vision and desired outcomes allow the team to explore and define the solution create funding structure and timing “gates” provide physical infrastructure …
Don’t blow all your money on an MVP
I fear a general misconception out there that you can validate a startup in just a few weeks. I have been particularly pained by both non-coder startup founders and managers at big companies who think that all they need to do is pour money into a single MVP and they’ll have a binary answer as to whether something is awesome …
Book review: Lean UX
The Lean UX book arrived on my iPad last night, and I’ve just finished reading it cover to cover. I thought it was great. That judgement is not actually because I work with the authors Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. I find most business books to be pretty banal, and I promise you that I would just stay silent if I …
You fail until you succeed
Innovation fails until it succeeds and, if you are running a corporate innovation team, you have to let that process happen. While there is a huge desire to measure *everything* these days, I don’t think that corporate innovation programs can be judged based on short-term metrics. Their ideas and the progress of those ideas should be judged, but not the …
The humble approach to product design
Great quote on the creation of gmail: Buchheit later called Gmail’s development process “the humble approach to product design.” “What’s the right attitude? Humility,” he wrote on his blog. “It doesn’t matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don’t know what you’re doing. The good news is that nobody else does, either, though some are foolish …
Pivots Steal Startups (Burning is So Much Better)
It feels like every week Techcrunch hosts an article that says “lean startup doesn’t work my my category.” I would remain blissfully ignorant of these pieces if not for the fact that they end up polluting my morning coffee, when I scan my twitter stream. The latest is Roman Stanek’s piece on enterprise software. “There is much talk in the …
The Paradox of Patience
Lean is all about speeding up cycle times, reducing waste, compressing the hunt for product-market fit. So at face value it seems like it should be all about going fast fast fast. Ironically I find that lean often requires a great deal of patience, sometimes uncomfortably so. You need to give yourself time to gather data and let experiments run. …
Lean’s Great Dilemma: Persist or Pivot
The Lean Startup Conference finished with a discussion between Marc Andreessen and Eric Ries. Two points rose to the fore: “lean is not an excuse to avoid sales and marketing” (side note: agree, but lean helps you decide when to scale up those efforts); and “persistence is still really important.” The last point is the great dilemma of lean. When …