Age of Product’s Food for Thought of November 15th, 2015 covers: Sequoia’s unicorn scouts, lessons learnt from passing on Twitter, Agile Clinic, failure helps creativity, Eric Ries on Lean Startup, how to hire a product manager, the story of Shazam.
Welcome to the Agile Clinic – Our New LinkedIn Group For Agile Change
Let’s Fix Agile
When I wrote the Agile Failure Patterns In Organizations post in October, I could not anticipate the feedback it would receive: Over 80 comments on the Hacker News thread and almost 15,000 readers on the blog and additional channels like DZone or Business2Community.
Food For Thought #14: Y Combinator Playbook, AI & Unemployment, How To Say ‘No’
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of November 8th, 2015 covers: Y Combinator (Economist reporting and Sam Altman’s startup playbook), artificial intelligence and mass unemployment, unhealthy Scrum obsessions, Tim Ferriss’ How to say ‘No’, e-commerce trends and the black box of product management.
Food for Thought #13: Disruption, Permalancers, ConvertKit & Persuasion Lessons
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of November 1st, 2015 covers: The future of work Uber-style, product design lessons with ConvertKit, persuasive product design, whether Uber is disruptive or not (spoiler alert: nope), the failure of Ebookmakr, company culture BS and why organizations don’t learn.
Ebookmakr Failure: The Fallacy of Knowing What to Build – The Post Mortem
Executive Summary – Lessons Learned from Ebookmakr’s Failure:
- Love the problem more than your solution.
- Don’t push too far your dreams of China in your hand.
- Use prototyping tools such as Marvel when running user interviews. (More here: Four Lessons Learned From Making Customer Value Your Priority.)
- Be careful with the selection process for user interviews: You might end up picking those that will support your vision – it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy trap.
- Beware of false positives in user interviews.
- Never start writing a single line of code before an appropriate number of customers signed up. (For clarification: Customers are paying users.)
- Never spend money on developing a prototype when you’re not working full-time on growing the user-base and increasing customer value.
- Be patient and give your product the time it needs.
- Always make branded t-shirts and wear them later regularly to preserve the recollection of the disaster. (See below.)
Food for Thought #12: Holacracy, Customer Value, What Is Success, The Feed
Age of Product’s Food for Thought on October 25th, 2015 on: Holacracy w/ Tony Hsieh of Zappos, customer value driven product design, what is “success” w/ Jerry Colonna & Brad Feld, slaves of the feed, how Bigcommerce started, 2015 Pacific Crest SaaS Survey, Software Eats Healthcare and how Expensify doubled its customer base.