Remove Conversion Remove Product Development Remove Sales Remove Washington
article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule.

Customer 167
article thumbnail

Five Rules for Making Products That Sell Themselves

YoungUpstarts

If you don’t, then how can you design and price your product and know whether it’s worth pursuing in the first place? Here are four steps you can build into the front end of your new product development process: Step 1: Identify benchmarking outcomes. The most dangerous stage-gate conversations are those that don’t take place.

Product 251
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time

Startup Lessons Learned

This gets me into trouble, because it conjures up for some the idea that product development is simply a rote mechanical exercise of linear optimization. You just constantly test little micro-changes and follow a hill-climbing algorithm to build your product. But where do those ideas come from in the first place?

article thumbnail

Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Leverage product development with open source and third parties.

article thumbnail

What would you want to tell Washington DC about startups?

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 8, 2009 What would you want to tell Washington DC about startups? Im writing this post from an airplane headed to Washington DC, where Ill be presenting at the Government 2.0 Similarly, government purchasing is a frustrating series of hoops, even compared to enterprise sales.

DC 90
article thumbnail

Marching through quicksand

Startup Lessons Learned

So I generally feel right at home in these conversations. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. It’s a fascinating time to see content industries in action, because they are facing a constantly changing landscape and are really trying to keep up.

article thumbnail

John Doerr's 10 lean startup tips

Startup Lessons Learned

This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. How do you drop a phrase like "voluntary salary reduction tool" and then not describe it :) Unless youre simply talking about the standard "hey, take less cash and Ill give you more options" type conversation.

Lean 121