Andrew Chen, long one of the best startup/growth voices out there, just tweeted about “The Traction Treadmill” —“It’ll kill your company,” he writes. Before I go on, let me explain what he means by that term. You’ve got a startup with okay customer retention, but not great. You successfully boost growth by doubling or tripling sales & marketing spend. You’re …
A sentence stood out to me yesterday in a doc Randy Silver shared on Twitter: “One of the most jealously guarded secrets of TV is the reality that those who get their pilots made and show picked up on any given year are usually no more gifted, visionary, or prodigious, than the ones who did not.” The document Randy shared …
A young product leader I’m mentoring asked me a common question: “How do you set metrics for a new initiative when you don’t have a baseline, nor any idea what good looks like?” First off, it’s ok to begin with guesses. You just want to make sure that everyone knows that it’s a guess. Product managers can fall prey to …
Lately, I’ve found myself questioning the concept of product-market fit. Not long after Marc Andreessen coined the term, entrepreneurs (and intrapreneurs) starting asking themselves, “do I have it yet?” and often rushing to answer “yes,” with all sorts of bad consequences. I did a tweetstorm/post about the mistakes that come with getting it wrong, but the topic is still bouncing …
First Round Capital has a wonderful online network, basically a white-labelled quora, for people at their portfolio companies. I answer questions now and then. Here are some of the Q’s I have answered over the last year or two: What are best practices for including and leveraging the design team in your product development process? I boil it down to …
I’m really enjoying Rand Fishkin’s new book Lost and Founder. He takes a lot of myths that distort entrepreneurship and attacks them head on. One of the ways he structured the book was to take an external quote, set it up as a straw man, and then debunk it. Imagine my surprise when I got to chapter two and his …
Startup CEOs face a very tricky transition period when their software engineering teams are between 10 and 30 people. If you are lucky, your early technical lead can make the transition to managing a growing team and communicating effectively with execs and board members, but that doesn’t always align with people’s interests or capabilities. In this situation, the mistake that …
It’s depressing how many companies accuse their product and engineering teams of being a black box. The accusations aren’t always fair, but they usually stem from two root problems: 1. not enough collaboration, and 2. not enough externalization. Here’s how we are tackling those two things at our company. Collaboration: We run a bi-weeky “qualitative research” meeting where anyone in …
When I first joined Axial, the product and engineering side of things was pretty broken, and there was a serious absence of trust. The team didn’t trust leadership, and leadership didn’t trust the team. The rest of the business — actually, even worse, customers — didn’t trust product/engineering. The culprits may sound familiar to some of you: Features took months to ship, if they …
Last week I had breakfast with a founder-CEO who had been through the wringer. After spending years building a successful services business, she got squeezed out and screwed by an unscrupulous business partner. Not one to stay down, she picked herself up and started a new firm, only to be diagnosed with cancer. But she kept on fighting. She beat …