Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Do they have better sales, marketing, or product development groups? What the winners start with is the realization that in a world of continuous disruption, they have only a few years to develop new capabilities or be pushed over the brink. Is it that some CEOs are better than others? Are their people smarter?

Incubator 402

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Creators of new products in environments of extreme uncertainty, startups face enormous risks. Insufficient capital, over investment, and low sales are just some of the reasons leading to this sobering statistic. In the US, about 50% of small businesses fail in the first five years. This reduces guesswork, time, money and effort.

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

He wrote a post this long weekend on how he manages the board of DataSift. In this period (less than 2 years) he has brought on incredibly talented senior execs is sales, marketing, product management, client services, finance, vp engineering and more. Rob Bailey is the CEO of DataSift. You should read it.

Advisory Board 365

Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle. In the 20 th century startups I was part of, the time to build a first product release was measured in years as we turned out the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. Finally the board would fire the VP of sales.

Restful 222

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

Our sales guys were on the front line and heard what they needed to win deals. They communicated this to product management who looked at all of the internal requirements we had generated (e.g. and product management worked with me to decide what to build & when. The Outside In organization had a one-way flow.

Customer 280

Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

And if you worked just 20 hours/week (on average) at that rate you’d clear $150,000 annually without the hassle of hiring and managing an employee. Most consulting companies I know have a few internal projects which they hope to someday turn into money-making products. Isn’t that better? What to do? Lack of focus kills.

America 330

America Employee Hiring HTML 330

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 14, 2014

As companies strive to stay agile and innovative, they’ve discovered that units of 8 to 12 people work best as the natural size of high-performance teams. This is the magic number for leadership teams, product teams, research teams, design teams, and more. I definitely know that those jerks from Sales have their own selfish agenda.

Agile 196

Agile Leadership Architecture Product Development 196

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

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 4, 2020

Initially, you may be able to do everything in your startup, including product development, marketing, and shipping orders. As you move from development to rollout, a team effort is required, including marketing, sales, funding, and customers. Look for tools to automate and simplify strategy execution.

Advisory Board 308

Advisory Board Agile Social Media Metrics 308

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2010

Management in the Transition. To get to this Transition stage, the company needed passionate visionaries who can articulate a compelling vision, agile enough to learn and discover in real time, resilient enough to deal with countless failures, and responsive enough to capitalize on what they learned in order to secure early customers.

Agile 120

Agile Development Team Review Leadership Merger 120

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 8, 2019

In addition to managing and analyzing customer experience variables, another core problem for SMBs is finances – maintaining steady cash flow and managing your company’s budget. This allows you to determine upcoming customer behavior and sales trends , restructure your inventory as needed, and develop appropriate marketing campaigns.

Small Business 153

Small Business Agile Analytics Finance 153

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, September 11, 2009 The cardinal sin of community management Once you have a product launched, you will the face the joys – and the despair – of a community that grows up around it. This probably sounds illogical. We were totally unprepared for the magnitude of what happened.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 19, 2010

During a lull in her practice she got a serendipitous opportunity to shift gears completely and ended up leading software product development teams. Turns out that for big-business project management it's more valuable to be a sensible thinker and counselor than to be an expert in debugging legacy C++ code.). Personal authority.

Software Review 325

Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Bolivia 325

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

Hearpreneur

SEPTEMBER 22, 2021

Tesla has always put a huge emphasis on product development and technological advancement. Shopify swiftly came in with solutions that allowed these firms to turn their point-of-sale terminals into e-commerce storefronts and begin online operations the same day. For me, it's a live example of agile and sustainable business.

Technical Review 120

Technical Review Entrepreneur Software Review SEO 120

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

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) As we described in previous posts , startups fail on the day they’re founded if they are organized and managed like they are a small version of a large company. Albert Einstein. That’s the definition of insanity.

Burn Rate 247

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 247

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. StageGate Process. This is a big idea.

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Venture Chronicles

AUGUST 2, 2013

3) It all starts with the product: Companies can overcome a great many challenges with band-aids, duct tape, and bailing wire. but one aspect of a startup and/or growth stage company that cannot be glossed over is the product. It all starts with the product. Lastly, a foundational skill of great product managers is GSD.

Product 62

Product CTO Hire Architecture Startup 62

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

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

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

It should go without saying that this post is not advice, nor is it recommendation of what you should do, it’s simply my observation of how companies using Customer Development positioned themselves to successfully raise money from venture investors. They will realize that you have built a startup that’s agile, resilient and customer-centric.

Customer Development 262

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

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

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

To shed some light, I talked with kaChing , a destination that enables individual investors to find outstanding money managers to manage their money. kaChing launched a virtual portfolio management game on Facebook in January 2008 and a similar version shortly thereafter on kaChing.com.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

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

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

AUGUST 12, 2021

Leverage the innate agility. A Fractional CINO addresses these missing skill sets: The MisFortune 10,000 Tend to Lack These Innovation Skills: Process and Innovation Project Management Skills — including: team building, culture leadership, innovation project roadmapping, and more. Here’s why.

Framework 71

Framework Agile Product Development Hiring 71

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Id like to talk about a technique Ive used to help manage this growth without slowing down. Managers in this area have to take a portfolio approach, promoting ideas that work and might make good candidates for further investment. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 30, 2010

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. Agile Development, meet Agile Business. After your product launch. Point #1: Developing a Proof of Concept.

Software Review 284

Software Review Startup Technical Review Hosting 284

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 18, 2010

Congratulations to all of you who actually managed to slog through it.). Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA……………… 5. Customer Development Manifesto. The Leading Cause of Startup Death: The Product Development Diagram. Sales, Not Awards……… 196.

Silicon Valley 202

Silicon Valley Customer Development IP Developer 202

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. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Expo SF (May.

Audience 119

Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

bhargreaves.com

MARCH 7, 2010

The reasons why I am not a big fan of development shops are too numerous to go into here. In brief, startups succeed because there is strong alignment of interests among all parties, especially with the people who are actually building the product. You probably aren’t the best person to hire and manage a developer.

Hiring 40

Hiring Technical Review Agile Software Review 40

ConversionXL

JANUARY 24, 2017

With agile development cycles and uncertain monetization models, they live and die by data and experimentation. More and more, people are using experimentation as a way to optimise not just sales – but also pricing, functionality, and product. And that expands the skills that optimisers need. ” Deeper Data Skills.

Conversion 48

Conversion Technical Review Artificial Inteligence Analytics 48

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

In a few cases, they are clearly smart people in a bad situation, and Ive written about their pain in The product managers lament and The engineering managers lament. The last thing you need is a manager telling you how to do your job. But there *are* bad managers, and sometimes they cant be fixed.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94