When you’re launching a new venture, one of your hungry competitor earliest considerations is how your innovation might fit into the existing technical environment: should it replace some dominant species or improve the overall market climate? In ecological terms, is your new company going to produce fish food or fight the largest carnivores for survival? And how should that decision shape the company you create? Continue reading
Recently, I had lunch with a bright young product manager trying to perfect the process for deciding which features to include in his next product release. Skipping past theory about “internal ROI” and other quantitative approaches, we talked about having to choose among the many demands for enhancements from sales teams: that MRDs are only the starting point in an ongoing lobbying campaign for product improvements. In other words, product managers will always have to manage the emotional world of people and internal politics. Continue reading
There’s a funny paradox about joining a tiny company and helping it grow. If part of its attractiveness is an intimacy and lack of management overhead, success creates its own challenges.
Very small companies can operate on informal communications: all ten employees know what each other are doing. The entire staff can grab lunch together, and all-hands meetings easily fit into the conference room. News is shared over the cube wall. Job descriptions and titles are afterthoughts. Decisions are made in the aisle. Continue reading
Most founders of VC-backed start-ups tend toward technical degrees, MBAs and forty-something gray hair – with a strong male bias. Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, though, there’s a group of seventh-grade girls who are doing it all: writing business plans, raising venture capital, manufacturing products, and running their own profitable companies. Ten years from now, you may be working for one of them. Continue reading
Whenever customers buy your product or service, there’s a leap of faith that they will get value from you. An alternative is to offer your solution in return for some of the savings — and to measure this in the customer’s own business units. Even if you fall back on traditional pricing, it will help the customer assign real value to what you deliver. Continue reading
From the outside, it might seem that joining a fledgling start-up should only be about economics and the big payoff: the popular business press always has stories of farsighted technologists, instant millionaires, and thirty-somethings coping with Sudden Wealth Syndrome. And there are certainly enough folks in the Valley who have made it that most of us know one.
This strikes me as too narrow a view, though – and leaves out the important emotional aspects of start-ups. Deep into my fourth adventure, I’m less occupied by eventual exit strategies than by the day-to-day challenge of managing chaotic growth. Continue reading
Price lists are never quite current enough, sufficiently detailed, or cover enough of the awkward special situations that customers raise. So, there’s a tendency for HQ product and pricing folks to do a lot of tinkering on the margins with their price lists. We may be forgetting the “consumers” of price lists, though: sales reps who pay our salaries and customers wondering what to buy. Complicated pricing models may be self-defeating. Continue reading