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Telling the 800-lb Gorilla to Shove it up his Ass

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

It was the little precambrian warm-blooded agile (oh sorry, now we're saying "lean") rodents who adapted by getting "outside the nest" to discover how to eat cockroaches, because we all know that cockroaches are the one form of life that can survive anything. What are your experiences with meeting dinosaurs on the sales floor?

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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

Steve Blank has devoted many years now to trying to answer that question, with a theory he calls Customer Development. This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development.

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Lessons Learned: The engineering manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

As I evolved my thinking, I started to frame the problem this way: How can we devise a product development process that allows the business leaders to take responsibility for the outcome by making conscious trade-offs? When I first encountered agile software techniques, in the form of extreme programming , I thought I had found the answer.

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Lessons Learned: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done.

Startup Lessons Learned

Now its time to start to think seriously about how to find a repeatable and scalable sales process, how to position and market the product, and how to build a product development team that can turn an early product into a Whole Product. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May.

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Datablindness

Startup Lessons Learned

You constantly assess the situation, looking for hazards and timing your movements carefully to get across safely. I got a powerful taste of datablindness recently, as I’ve started to work with various large companies as partners in setting up events, speeches, and other products to sell around the Lean Startup concept.

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Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

Startup Lessons Learned

Its a key lean startup concept. The idea of leverage is simple: for every ounce of effort your product development team puts into your product, find ways to magnify that effort by getting many other people to invest along with you. For example, I recently created a customer validation exercise around the Lean Startup Workshop.

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Real Unfair Advantages

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

You don't have an "edge" just because you're passionate, hard-working, or "lean.". During a lull in her practice she got a serendipitous opportunity to shift gears completely and ended up leading software product development teams. P.S. For more, here are detailed examples of how this mindset also sets up your sales pitch.