Tag: entrepreneurship

  • It’s not easy, bein’ lean

    If you’re tired of hearing about Lean Startups I recommend giving Fred’s post a quick read. It addresses most of the criticisms you may have heard.

    My only negative observation is that “being lean” is an old idea that Eric Ries has done a great job of explaining anew.

    When I led search on the Yahoo home page we were completely data driven. I worked with a team of great designers and engineers, and we came up with many cool (and many lame) ideas for how to improve the visibility and usefulness of search. We A/B tested everything. That said, we weren’t testing towards a specific vision. Our job was to increase search traffic, but the company did not have a coherent product vision to back this up. So we ended up learning a lot about specific things (search box colour, placement, functionality) but those learnings never connected to each other. It was like designing the next BMW coupe by optimizing the door handles and mirrors without paying attention to the cars overall performance.

    Lean is about moving towards a vision through learning, and adjusting your vision based on what you learn. Effective execution is no substitute for strategy, and Eric recognizes that. Now go read the book– especially if you’re just starting out as a designer, product manager, or engineer.

    It’s not easy, bein’ lean

  • Customers Sell

    People chase investors, but your best investor is your first real customer. And your customers are also your best salesmen.

  • Pivot. Communicate.

    It’s been a long week. Starbucks finally announced my main project. I’ve been juggling calls with both India and California, taking care of the dog-in-law, and not sleeping much.

    We’re building a new kind of web UI on top of a lot of complicated technology platforms (location detection, a content management system, etc.). It’s a fun change from my last two prducts (Yahoo! Toolbar and My Yahoo!), which both required engineering rebuilds of existing products with big audiences. We’re working with great design teams – both external and in house – and are building something very, very pretty. Given where we are in the project, a few posts seemed really relevant.

    On Tuesday Chris Dixon wrote a great post on Pivoting. He talks about the “Bridge over the River Kwai” problem, where entrepreneurs fall so in love with their engineering project that they lose site of the bigger mission. I’ve seen the same thing with engineering managers, product managers, and designers. Frequently. The only solution is to keep asking why and to listen to the answers. When you inevitably screw up because the product guys misheard the engineering manager, or the engineers misunderstood the designers, remember to solve the problem with better communication – not longer specifications! Overly-detailed specifications are usually a sign that something is very, very wrong with your approach to building software.

    That’s all. Time to crank through the rest of Friday before retiring to my deck with a book and a pillow.