Breaking Glass by Rishi Dean

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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I gave this talk last week to the members of the TiE Leadership Program, aimed at helping to frame what it takes to develop a product organization — aimed at an audience of non-product start-up execs, and existing / aspiring start-up CEOs. Take a look at the slides for the specific “tips”, but here’s a brief summary of the areas I covered, along with specific references I made to concepts, ideas, books, and people that I have learned a lot from along the way.
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I recently came across the blog of a former classmate, Gummi Hafsteinsson. While always insightful, Gummi’s post, entitled “What makes a good product manager for software development?” is particularly noteworthy.

Gummi’s keys to excellent product management
In his post Gummi argues that to be successful, one needs the following core traits:

• Deep technical understanding
• Speed of execution and juggling skills
• Obsessive enthusiasm about the product experience

While I wholeheartedly agree with Gummi (and I would highly encourage you to read his post to fully understand his perspective), here’s another way to think about what it takes to be a great PM…

My take: Be like Jake

Yes, shamelessly capitalizing on Avatar’s popularity, I think the core traits a good software product manager needs are well embodied by Sam Worthington’s character in Avatar: Jake Sully. These are simply:

• Brains
• Guts
• Charisma
• Character

Here’s how good product managers use each of these.
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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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