Remove Marketing Remove Product Development Remove Silicon Valley Remove Technology
article thumbnail

A heartbreaking story about time and money.

Berkonomics

Since this number is budgeted and pre-authorized, managers tend to focus upon other things such as sales, marketing and product development issues. In the technology sector where I most often play, extended unplanned software development cycles account for the majority of these corporate failures.

article thumbnail

Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores.

Steve Blank

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.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

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

article thumbnail

The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

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?

article thumbnail

Inconsistency And Premature Scaling Main Cause For Startup Failure: Blackbox

YoungUpstarts

Blackbox , founded by entrepreneurs Bjoern Lasse Herrmann and Max Marmer, in June released its first Startup Genome Report — a 67-page in depth analysis on what makes Silicon Valley startups successful based on profiling over 650 startups. Inconsistent startups write 3.4 times more lines of code in the discovery phase and 2.25

article thumbnail

How to Configure Your Startup Team

Both Sides of the Table

My rationale is simple: everything goes wrong and only great teams can respond to competitors, markets, funding environments, staff departures, PR disasters and the like. PM’s are underrated in Silicon Valley these days. Without strong PMs you build crappy products that nobody needs or that real people can’t use.

Cofounder 388
article thumbnail

Vertical Markets 2: Customer/Market Risk versus Invention Risk.

Steve Blank

Customer/Market Risk Versus Invention Risk One day I was having lunch with a VC sharing what I learned from my students. Steve,&# he said, “you’re missing the most interesting part of vertical markets. Markets with Customer/Market Risk are those where the unknown is whether customers will adopt the product.

Vertical 147
article thumbnail

The Customer Development Manifesto: The Startup Death Spiral (part.

Steve Blank

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.