Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

To succeed they realized this isn’t simply coming up with one new product. The company had hired a leading management consulting firm that helped them select 15 critical areas of change the Tsunami Initiative was tasked to work on. It meant pivoting an entire company – and its culture. Are these the real problems?

Framework 389

Framework Distribution Channel Leadership 389

bhargreaves.com

MARCH 7, 2010

Most disturbingly, I’ve occasionally found myself agreeing with an entrepreneur’s decision to hire a development shop to build their product. The reasons why I am not a big fan of development shops are too numerous to go into here. You probably aren’t the best person to hire and manage a developer.

Hiring 40

Hiring Technical Review Agile Software Review 40

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 8, 2019

That’s why, though you should of course hire a professional financial adviser and accountant , new BI software is a better day-to-day solution and helps you fend off problems before they arise. Stay Agile. Predictive analytics, though, positions you ahead of the agile curve.

Small Business 153

Small Business Agile Analytics Finance 153

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

MAY 22, 2019

Companies are investing in innovation training, mostly learning frameworks like Lean, Agile, or Design Thinking. Nearly all that training is for dedicated innovation teams , or employees who are focused on new product development. Engaged support for strategic and tactical innovation initiatives developed by others.

Operations 54

Operations Employee Technical Review Agile 54

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

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

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 30, 2010

A virtual assistant (VA) is a remote worker hired to complete tasks you should not be doing as the founder of a startup. Ideally, by the time I code it up, we'll have many customers using the platform which means I'll be working on a product I know is viable, and that's paying for the time I'm spending to automate it.

Software Review 284

Software Review Startup Technical Review Hosting 284

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

This builds on a lot of great thinking that has come before, like the agile movements insistence that only the creation of working code counts as progress for a software development team. We set sales targets from day one, $300 the first month. As the experiments progressed, day-in-day-out we werent making sales.

San Francisco 98

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

Venture Chronicles

AUGUST 2, 2013

I have covered a couple of topics in this series, the first being hiring the best people and the second organizing for success based on the attributes of the people you are hiring. 3) It all starts with the product: Companies can overcome a great many challenges with band-aids, duct tape, and bailing wire.

Product 62

Product CTO Hire Architecture Startup 62

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. Even worse, agile wasnt really helping me ship higher quality software.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

ConversionXL

MAY 1, 2017

Reporting in the Harvard Business Review on a major study of growth stalls they conducted, Olson and his colleagues cite the case of the iconic brand Levi Strauss, which hit a historic high mark of sales in 1995, reaching revenue of $7 billion, but then, starting in 1996, saw a decline in sales so precipitous that by 2000, revenue was down to $4.6

Technical Review 127

Technical Review Algorithm Channel Analytics 127

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

AUGUST 12, 2021

Leverage the innate agility. Real expertise is expensive and many second stage companies get sticker shock when faced with hiring expertise. New ideas need to integrate product development with marketing and sales as well. Hire a Fractional Chief Innovation Officer, It’s the 80/20 Solution.

Framework 71

Framework Agile Product Development Hiring 71

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

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. You can learn about customer development, and quite a bit more, in Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. It slices, it dices.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge.

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. In contrast, sales and marketing activities before first customer ship are adhoc, fuzzy, and don’t have measurable, concrete objectives. Freemium models have their own scorekeeping.)

Customer Development 215

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

In an enterprise sales context, this is called a "repeatable and scalable sales process" - once you know how to do this, your company can graduate from early adopters and make an attempt at the mainstream. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you? Expo SF (May.

Audience 119

Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In the tactics section, list your sales channels and describe how you will be selling your products. If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. This is the simplest version of your product minus the frills and frosting.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Github - Free public repositories, collaborator management, issue tracking, wikis, downloads, code review, graphs Pivotal Tracker – Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration. WebSequenceDiagrams - sketch sequence diagrams. Lighthouse – Issue Tracking Tool.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers. Hire a CTO or VP Engineering. Worst of all, your teammates are constantly wanting to have meetings. Just change it.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

If any of the answers are “Yes,” then hire them a bit later as an early employee. Key attributes of an entrepreneur on a founding team are passion, determination, resilience, tenacity, agility and curiosity. They deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. FIgure out who you are.

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa. Expo SF (May. Conference streaming, sponsors, discounted tickets.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

You can almost set your watch to six months or so after first customer ship, when Sales starts missing its “numbers,” the board gets concerned and Marketing tries to “make up a better story.” The web site and/or product presentation slides start changing and Marketing and Sales try different customers, different channels, new pricing, etc.

Burn Rate 247

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 247

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

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. Expo SF (May. Conference streaming, sponsors, discounted tickets.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Because, unless you are working in an extremely static environment, your product development team is learning and getting better all the time. Most importantly, I encouraged the leaders of the company to bring awareness of the business challenges to the product development team. Great post, Eric. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

These companies produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed 450,000 workers that year. These companies produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed 450,000 workers that year. Substantial research shows that immigrants play a key role in American job creation. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 121

San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

For example, I quickly learned that when I twittered about the event, more often than not I would make a sale. So the product development team was busy creating lots of split-tests for lots of hypotheses. And here is the howto for your sales bell: [link] Have fun! :-) June 9, 2009 1:42 AM David Skillern said.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

To acquire new money managers, the company makes traditional sales calls, which means they’ve interviewed many, many professionals and gotten a strong sense of their needs. .&# says Rachleff. At the same time, whenever a customer closes an account, kaChing contacts the person to find out why; most agree to a short phone interview. .&#

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

A few of the detailed case studies include: Tech legend Bill Gross building an MVP in 1999 to test demand for online car sales, which grew into CarsDirect.com. PayPal, under the leadership of David Marcus and Bill Scott, re-defining and re-engineering itself by embracing Lean Startup to improve the product experience.

Lean 167

Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

Steve Blank

JANUARY 10, 2011

The VP of an operating division had run into trouble in product development; the product was late and getting later. The revenue plan had the new product baked into the numbers and it was clear that this division General Manager was going to crater his forecast (happens all the time, nothing new here.) Lie to My Face.

Forecast 264

Forecast Agile Revenue Founder 264

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. If they had done this, there would have been zero dollars in sales. Why does Market Type matter?

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

turn customer feedback into sales and relationships. Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration. Great for visualizing work of product development. Agile project management. agile product management. agile product management and Scrum tool. Agile eLearning.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

In particular, a marketing launch can help you do three things (courtesy, as is most of my marketing advice, of The Four Steps to the Epiphany ): Drive customers into your sales pipeline. Combining agile development with customer developm. In the right situation, its a very useful tactic, too. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

But if that piece-parts solution is great, then its unlikely they are going to need to buy any additional products. Because this language may lead you to believe this concept is for enterprise sales only, I thought Id walk you through an example from the world of consumer electronics. Combining agile development with customer developm.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

It became clear to me that the mission of marketing in most companies has to be to support sales. While this may seem obvious to anyone not in sales and marketing, trust me, in a technology company this is a conceptual breakthrough. Every marketing communication hire couldn’t wait to produce the next great ad or PR program.

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 126