Category Archives: startups

Customer Interview For Product Discovery

Conducting customer interviews is a great way to validate, or invalidate, your product idea. Interviewing potential customers is almost always a cheaper and faster way to learn what your customers’ needs are, compared to building the product first and then discovering that you built the wrong thing. Even with an existing product, you can discover which new features will be most valuable through customer interviews. Here’s a great video that explains how to do it.

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Want a smart team? Make sure it gets the recommended daily allowance of estrogen

A team without a woman is like a bicycle with… some fish? So it would seem, according to Grace Nasri, who writes in the HuffPo about the gender gap in tech from an interesting perspective. She got my attention with a 2011 HBR story profiling research by Anita Wooley and Thomas Malone showing that the one significant factor that demonstrably upped the measurable collective intelligence of a team was the presence of females on it.
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What’s An Agile Paycheck Look Like? A glimpse into Agile Learning Labs’ new compensation model

What kind of agile training company would we be if we didn’t try to build our company from the ground up using agile methods for everything from team decision making to hiring to how we pay ourselves? Here’s how we arrived at a radical new way of paying ourselves. (Hint: if you’ve seen the heist movie Ocean’s 11, our team compensation model is a lot like theirs.)
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5 Agile Ways to Rock the Boat with Eric Ries

Eric Ries Interview by Lara Druyan at Hackers and Founders, July 2011According to Eric Ries, another way to say “agile” is “extreme troublemaker.” If you think you know what’s given, constant, and unchangeable — think again.

In an interview with Lara Druyan at a recent Silicon Valley gathering hosted by 106 Miles and Hackers & Founders — Eric poked holes in the foundation of entrepreneurial sense and sensibility we all “know” so well.

From his interview, my favorite five agile ways to rock the boat of status quo are:
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What I learned at Startup Weekend SF: Agility is the state of nature

What's a good mother/son spring break activity? Why, going to Startup Weekend and spending 50 hours building a company with ten total strangers. Perfect because my 17 year-old vastly prefers the company of adults to that of other teenagers, and because he's been on the high school treadmill for so long that I thought it would be nice for him to see what the light at the end of the tunnel might look like–that the world of work can be a rather thrilling place.
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Long Live Lucky Oliver

RainInCity

On Wednesday, I’m doing a presentation on doing presentations. One of the little gems that I was looking forward to passing on was Lucky Oliver. It has been my favorite source for images for presentations and the web. The quality and variety of the images has been consistently great, and the prices were more than affordable. Today I discovered that Lucky Oliver will be closing down on May 15th. I’m sad to be losing this source for great photos, and sad to see the business fail. Best of luck to Bryan, and everyone else at Lucky Oliver.

Now where am I going to get my images? Any suggestions?

Cheers,

Chris

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SDForum SEM Sig

I spent the evening at the SDForum Software Engineering Management Special Interest Group (SEM Sig) meeting. The room was filled with engineering managers of almost every type and experience level. The presenter tonight was Narinder Sandhu, who worked at HP and Intuit before founding T-Rex Global. He managed to get everyone in the room to do a basic skills-assessment and career action plan, as part of his presentation comparing large companies to small startups.

After the formal presentation, the informal discussions were amazing. I talked with people about things as diverse as: finance, feedback, agile development, a mathematical model for organizational structures, and C vs. Lisp vs. Verilog! Oh yes, I’ll be back.

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Speaking of techdirt…

I was recently invited by techdirt’s Mike Masnick to be a part of the Techdirt Insight Community. The idea is really interesting:

The Techdirt Insight Community is a service that lets a company engage a dynamic and diverse group of experts who provide analysis and insight tailored to meet your specific needs quickly and cost effectively. Our qualified community of expert bloggers tackles your issues through an interactive online conversation and quickly provides you with the answers you need to drive your business forward.

I’m looking forward to it!

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