Under no circumstances should you...
Chap 1 - Getting Started - Monday, August 31, 2009 13:18 - Comments
Product Management For Hackers
Slightly different format for today’s publishing. I had the great fortune to spend the weekend with close to 300 people on the Microsoft campus for the Startup Weekend. It was amazing to see so many people come together and create so many awesome products in such a short period of time. I will have post my report out on the weekend up at my other blog sometime this week. For now, I wanted to share the slides from the talk that I gave: Product Management for Hackers. I received so many requests for the slides that I have posted them online. I have embedded them here if you just want to click through the slides, but would encourage you to download them to get the speaker notes as well.
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- …Not Solve A Real Problem
- …Not Focus On Building A Great Extended Team
- …Not Have A Well-Formed Interview Process
- …Not Understand What Type Of Leader You Are
- …Believe That You Need To Hire “Rock Stars”
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- Product Management For Hackers
- …Not Solve A Real Problem
- …Not Focus On Building A Great Extended Team
- …Not Have A Well-Formed Interview Process
- …Not Understand What Type Of Leader You Are
- …Believe That You Need To Hire “Rock Stars”
- …Write A Long Business Plan
- …Start A Company Because You Hate Your Job
- …Decide To Go It Alone
- …Choose Your Name Without Care
- …Start Building The First Idea You Have
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Chap 1 - Getting Started - Aug 31, 2009 13:18 - Comments
Product Management For Hackers
Slightly different format for today’s publishing. I had the great fortune to spend the weekend with close to 300 people on the Microsoft campus for the Startup Weekend. It was amazing to see so many people come together and create so many awesome products in such a short period of time. I will have post my report out on the weekend up at my other blog sometime this week. For now, I wanted to share the slides from the talk that I gave: Product Management for Hackers. I received so many requests for the slides that I have posted them online. I have embedded them here if you just want to click through the slides, but would encourage you to download them to get the speaker notes as well.
More In Chap 1 - Getting Started
- …Not Understand What Type Of Leader You Are
- …Write A Long Business Plan
- …Start A Company Because You Hate Your Job
- …Choose Your Name Without Care
- …Start Building The First Idea You Have
Chap 2 - Building A Team - Aug 24, 2009 9:42 - Comments
…Not Focus On Building A Great Extended Team
So much ink is contributed to the topic of finding good co-founders and hiring great employees, but very few offering advice steer you in the direction of needing to focus on your extended team. While the people with whom you are working day to day will have a great deal of impact on the success or failure of your project or business, the people with whom you interact less often might actually save your ass.
The line item on your income statement of “professional services” can be a pretty broad one, and mostly encompasses service providers which are considered non-core to your business. Until you are a large company, you will most likely be outsourcing a good deal of services to these providers, and finding the right partner can mean the difference between good work and wasted money. There may be service providers whose services are specific to your industry, but more generally, every business needs a lawyer, a banker, and an accountant. You may also need a professional recruiter and a commercial real estate broker.
Regardless of the type of service which is being rendered to you from these providers, it’s of utmost important that you find a provider that is right for you. This is going to depend on a few variables, but when in my past I have sought out these providers for my businesses, I learned (through mistakes) to ask the following questions: Continue Reading…
More In Chap 2 - Building A Team
- …Not Have A Well-Formed Interview Process
- …Believe That You Need To Hire “Rock Stars”
- …Decide To Go It Alone
Chap 3 - Building Product - Aug 27, 2009 10:03 - Comments
…Not Solve A Real Problem
“What’s it good for?” “So?” “And?…” Get used to hearing those questions. In venturing off on your own, there’s a chance you are going to be creating a new product or service that the world has never seen. As with anything, there are varying degrees to which there is newness to what you have created. There’s the product which is an improvement over an existing idea, but is novel or new enough that you could make claims that it is new. There is also the product which is so completely new as to require an explanation as to what it is or what its use is.
Marginal improvements over existing products can be very useful in the marketplace. They can help solve an old problem in a more efficient way. They can also add needless complexity to an already sublime product, yielding a new product which falls short of its predecessor. That’s the risk associated with a marginal improvement over an existing product. What exactly is the improvement, and is the product space ultimately better for it? The litmus test for that question is whether or not your competitors will immediately copy what you have done.
Completely new products are a mixed bag. Paul Graham is attributed with the following statement: “make something people want.” It’s a terribly simple, and terribly powerful concept which, unfortunately, is overlooked far more often that it is yielded. This is the burden you will bear should you endeavor to build a completely never been seen before product. Not only will you have to spend a bunch of time explaining it to people who don’t get it (and there will be plenty of those), but you will have all of the insecurity associated with thinking that you are perpetrating some terrible act of hubris to believe that you could come up with this idea when no one else has done so before you.