Breaking Glass by Rishi Dean

Summary: Too often we either confuse, or merge, goals with constraints. While both are necessary, it’s essential to understand how to use each one properly to design plans that work. E-mail. Tweet. http://rdean.me/fIefuP

One issue that enrages me enough to rant about is is how often we conflate what is a goal with what is a constraint. While the differences may seem like nuance, confusing a business’ goals, with the the constraints they are subject to, leads to a lack of focus and ultimately failing to achieve what you really want.

Goals are clear objectives for what you want your end state to be, while constraints are given conditions, or circumstances that your solution must satisfy…so to paraphrase Seth Godin, a goal would be “to go to the moon”, and a constraint of that would be “to overcome gravity”. Sounds simple enough, right? Then why do these get confused so often, and how should we think about each one?

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Summary: While building culture at a startup is challenging, entrepreneurs often, implicitly or explicitly, follow five core patterns of hiring and managing people. These “employment models” have profound effects on the culture and performance of the firms. E-mail. Tweet.

In my previous post, I discussed some rules of thumb for designing and building culture at startups. Here I’ll dive into a little more detail into the academic underpinnings of those ideas, stemming from a course I took called Designing & Leading the Entrepreneurial Organization while at MIT Sloan, taught by Diane Burton. This is my retelling of that information, so I take no credit for the theories and research behind it…so I’ll do my best to do it justice.

The research, by the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies (SPEC), sampled 175 young high-tech firms in Silicon Valley, over the course of 1994 – 2000. They analyzed these companies along three core dimensions of how they approached managing people, and arrived at five prototypical employment models (whether intentionally or unintentionally)…which you can think of as like a business version of the famed software Design Patterns.

Learn about the 5 models…

Pricing your application is always an issue of hot debate, with much interesting literature and guides in the space. While there are only a handful of macro models out there, or as Shelly Palmer puts it: “I pay, you pay, someone else pays”, there are variety of ways to combine and segment for various audiences.

The increasingly popular “freemium” model, brought into the mainstream by pundits like Chris Anderson, delivers a free version of your product that enables users to try it out, and then charges for up-sells in the form of services, support, or premium features.

While the basics are easy to understand in this model, getting the details right is quite tricky, as it gives rise to a number of questions: What do you limit? How much is too much to give away? What is a “premium” feature?.

While Anderson gives a little guidance (see slide 17) on how to do this, by advising that premium features should be “time limited, feature limited, seat limited, customer limited”, it’s a little too simplistic for my liking. These are challenging decisions that require you to make some important decisions on how you shape your customer experience and prioritize development initiatives, so it seems we should be thinking deeper about these ways to limit the free version, while creating the right incentives for upgrades to the paid version(s).

Let’s look at some of the key dimensions that you can use to limit your application.

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Summary: Finding Product / Market Fit is the key for early stage products. The PMF Matrix is a framework to help you get there. E-mail. Tweet.
[UPDATE: This post was updated on July 5, 2010 with new slides]

This presentation centers on the concept of Product / Market Fit: what it is, why it’s important, and how to achieve it. I propose my “Product Market Fit Matrix” that helps to characterize the issues of the start-up and presents various frameworks that can help guide development. In a sense the Product / Market Fit Matrix is a meta-framework, which can be used to characterize your current situation, so that you can employ the right set of tools to achieve your goals.

I originally developed these slides to facilitate a discussion of entrepreneurial MIT alums, mainly from the MIT Sloan business school. My intention was to introduce many of the newer, leaner concepts of early stage start-up development, since MIT tends to see a lot of “technology-in-search-of-a-problem” start-ups, in their early stages.

After receiving a very positive reception, and lots of suggestions from many smart people, I’ve updated this presentation. The presentation below was developed for a talk called “The New Rules of Product Development” for MassChallenge.
See the presentation

Summary: With the mobile decade upon us, here are 10 categories where mobile’s next killer app may come from. Perhaps one could keep RIM relevant?. E-mail. Tweet.

With many proclaiming the mobile year or decade upon us, largely due to contributing factors like falling costs, better handsets, pervasive connectivity, and emerging standardization it seems we’re upon a new era of mobile development. After receiving some heat, from my Canadian counterparts, for recently berating RIM. I thought I’d be more positive, and present some ideas on where innovation may come from in the mobile application space, this year.

I’m reminded of Jeff Bezos’ quote from 1999:

“I liken it to the Cambrian era 550 million years ago, which saw the development of multicelled life. While nature tried every kind of experiment possible, the creation of new species was offset by the extinction of others.”

Searching for the next killer app
So, as Bezos implies, the explosion in the hundreds of thousands of ‘smartphone’ applications, may imply we’re just at the beginning of finding a killer app. Originally, it was voice, then text messaging, then e-mail; but what’s the next major application that will really spur the next phase of adoption and determine winners and losers?

So, I offer a classification taxonomy of how to think about various application forms, which may help determine where to look and think about what’s next. Rather than take a ‘genre-based’ approach like every other app catalog, or a technology-based organization, I’ve tried to build a framework based on customer needs, or as Clay Christensen would put it, the ‘jobs they do’, for people.

Here are 10 categories of where the next killer app may come from.

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I’m continually fascinated at how good product design & development can come down to basic psychology. I’ve previously written about how to use Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory for product design by understanding consumer decision biases. However, customers and developers alike can fall in to the same “decision traps”, as my friend and former business partner Professor J. Edward Russo, would put it.

Here we’ll look at some of these common decision traps, and how they can become roadblocks to qualitative customer research, on the road to finding product/market fit.
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I too am underwhelmed by yesterday’s iPad launch, and found it neither “magical”, nor “revolutionary”. I really hoped that leveraging the tablet form factor would actually solve a real problem for me. To me the tablet is begging for a pen-and-paper augmentation application suite…although I’m sure as I’m typing this someone has already developed an “app for that”.

What I want
With that application comes my needed, enabling feature: simple, cross-device cut & paste. That is, to take a hand drawn sketch from the tablet and seamlessly “beam it” over to a laptop or mobile device and have it ready for use immediately, just like you can across applications on a single platform.

What I don’t want
What I don’t want is to take a picture –> send it to a holding application –> pull it down on the other device –> insert it where I want. There are tools like Evernote and Dropbox for that. Nor am I relying on the long-held promise of “Pen Computing” where I have to add another expensive device to the mix.
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When wrestling with finding Product Market fit, via a Minimum Viable Product, (MVP), I constantly find myself referring to an issue I call the Engineer’s Paradox:

Engineers want to build for adoption, that is a carefully designed system that accommodates user adoption with the requisite features and performance they require, or else they will risk losing customers. Yet, to truly understand what users want, and how they will use the system, one needs to release a “suboptimal” product in order to gain customer feedback.

So, if you release junk early, no one will ever want what you build, but if you release a fully operational system too late, it may not conform to what user’s want. So, let’s see how we can find a happy medium…
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Summary: RIM needs a stronger consumer play, or a new mobile killer app, if it’s going to be relevant this decade.E-mail. Tweet.

Being back in Canada for the holidays, has me a little nostalgic – recalling my days at Waterloo, and since watching the meteoric rise of RIM in the past decade, along with Nortel’s precipitous fall from grace. Watching the new wave of mobile devices (formerly known as “smartphones”) and related consumer behavior patterns emerge, it got me thinking about what lies in store for RIM in this upcoming decade, and I’ve come to the realization that RIM may be on it’s way to become this new decade’s Canadian poster child as a high-tech also-ran.
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This past weekend, I finally watched the latest Star Trek movie (quite entertaining). In reconnecting with the franchise, it reminded me how innovative Gene Roddenberry (and his writers) were in developing some remarkable ideas, like the Transporter.

But despite the “genius” of Roddenberry’s ideas, it’s a stark reminder that ideas aren’t inventions; meaning just because you’ve thought of something doesn’t make it your invention. Last time I checked, Gene doesn’t have a patent on the Transporter, the Replicator, the Warp Drive, or any other Star Trek created idea. Turning ideas into reality is hard, and that’s where the true genius is – let’s not forget the words of Thomas Edison:

“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

Here we’ll explore the requirements for an “invention”, and the stages for successful commercialization.
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