When you’re defining your software or new product’s requirements, a set of criteria come into play. Acceptance criteria are one part of those criteria that are either agreed upon or come out of client/customer discussions. Unlike requirements, acceptance criteria define what…
Tap into people's unspoken needs to create breakthrough innovations.
Store brands are shrouded in secrecy. Who makes them?
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Believe it or not, the biggest demographic driving the greeting card industry is millennials.
Epson has gained some scrutiny in recent weeks after the company disabled a printer that was otherwise working fine, leading to accusations of planned obsolescence. Epson knows its printers will stop working without simple maintenance at a predictable point in the future, and it…
Amazon will continue to be highly competitive. Want to be successful? Optimize your product listings to the fullest with these tips.
What is an Opportunity Solution Tree? Learn more about opportunity solution trees and the 4 steps involved in creating them.
There is a huge and ever-widening gap between the devices we use to make the web and the devices most people use to consume it. It’s also no secret
Why might people decline an offer of up to $10,000 just to keep their feet on the ground?
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The tiny photo processing kiosks could be found everywhere in the 1970s and 1980s. And that was the problem.
The most significant bottleneck in the adoption of healthcare technology to date has been distribution. Over the last decade, generations of digital health companies have struggled to reach escape velocity—not because their products and services weren’t transformative, but…
In Deliberately Underselling as Sales Strategy, I wrote about the importance of sizing contracts below customer needs to ensure customer success. “A key part of the formula: crafting the right account executive compensation structure to reward this strategy.” I received a pile…
These five tactics will help simplify and clarify your technical copy.
Whether or not you should pursue a catalog strategy is a question that deserves significant thought. As digital marketing becomes more complex, it may make a lot of sense to send out correctly designed catalogs to the right customers. For e-commerce retailers without physical…
Though the industry is called venture capital, the goal of a VC isn’t to maximize every risk. Instead, we try to understand all the risks a business might face and weigh those risks with the reward - the exit. Here are the major risks that I typically review when a startup…
Over the past few years, marketing on the web has become way too much fun. I remember trying to figure out what “hits” on awstats [http://awstats.sourceforge.net/] meant in high school, and I distinctly can recall how disappointed I was when I found out the true meaning…
Many startups scramble to create a "minimum viable product," or MVP, to get a version of their product to market quickly for testing. It’s a great way to cost-effectively test a website or app with real users. But be careful, if your MVP is too minimalist, it could torpedo your…
A few months ago, I got this email from a customer: It would be wonderful if there was a way to tag/assign forwarded emails to specific task lists within client projects. The “email forwards” secti…
Not every business needs to have habit-forming products. Here's how two companies hooked customers and formed habits with products they rarely used.
![image](https://res.cloudinary.com/dzawgnnlr/image/upload/q_auto/f_auto/w_auto/image_81_690616509" width="500px"> Last night, Elon Musk inspired the audience at D. It is hard to overstate the scope and breadth of his ambitions or the impact of his start ups PayPal, Tesla, and…
Having a playbook of commonly used tactics lets team members understand their role in executing each play. A play is an agreed upon set of actions the team takes in a given situation.
Leverage marketing automation and customer data in a single Customer Engagement Platform.
I was recently talking with Mark Roberge, CRO at Hubspot, for a podcast we’re launching soon. I asked him, “What is a common question that…
“I’m into distribution, I’m like Atlantic I got them mutherfuckers flying’ cross the Atlantic” –Rick Ross, “Hustlin’“ When I ask new entrepreneurs what their distribution model will be, I often get answers like: “I don’t want to hire any of those Rolex-wearing, BMW-driving…
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Fair warning: this is a blog post about automated cat feeders. Sort of. But bear with me, because I'm also trying to make a point about software. If you have a sudden urge to click the back button on your browser now, I don't blame you. I don't often talk
Some lessons from the felt
When I first decided to start The Silicon Valley Product Group, I had just left eBay and had some very strong opinions about what makes great product teams, and great product cultures...
Guest One key risk facing marketplace operators is the threat of disintermediation, when a buyer chooses to work directly with a seller and bypasses your platform. Through our experience investing in several pioneering marketplace companies, we've seen a handful of clever ways…
Explore powerful business model patterns by iconic firms and leverage our interactive software for business model innovation.
The product management and startup worlds are buzzing about the importance of "validation". In this entry, I'll explain how this idea orig...
Criticizing Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs is like speaking out against motherhood and apple pie. The last time I criticized VOC programs, someone left a comment chastising me for presuming that a bank could know what its customers wanted without asking them.
One of my favorite things about Ruby on Rails is that it’s a very opinionated framework. It makes key decisions up and down the technology stack so that I don’t have to. As DHH puts it, Rails is omakase: A team of chefs picked out the ingredients, designed
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Note: With the arrival of my son, I’m slowing down on the blogging. Give me a couple months (or more sleepless nights), and I’ll be back…
Hubstaff founder Dave Nevogt shares how to test your startup idea by analyzing model, market and concept.
Do you rely too heavily on product management to ensure your product is successful? Joe Kinsella explores the importance of everyone in a startup being in PM.
Product is at the epicenter of everything a product led growth (PLG) company does. So how does the product organization and its PMs need to adapt? Find out here.
This is the story of how you’re buying your enterprise software the wrong way. Probably your appliances, too. This is an excerpt from my guide, “Enterprise Software Confidential.” This post is also available in Chinese thanks to Xu Zhi. Some years ago, I had a broken GE washer…
Conversations with customers are valuable, but they have to be the right type of conversations – not merely questions about forgotten passwords and the like. They have to add value, for you, and them.
If you're building a product, you have to be great at saying No. Not 'maybe' or 'later'. The only word is No. Building a great product isn't about creating tons of tactically useful features which are tangentially related. It's about delivering a cohesive product with well…
Amazon director Kintan Brahmbhatt, who's helped develop and refine the product strategy behind the Alexa and Amazon Music, explains the ways in which friction can live in your product, throwing roadblocks in a user's path to becoming a customer. He explains how to uncover…
Every startup I see invariably puts up a competitive analysis slide that plots performance on a X/Y graph with their company in the top right. The slide is a holdover from when existing companies l…
I’m now six months into Shopify. So far it’s going basically on schedule: as I was told, “Your first couple months you’re going to have zero idea what’s going on. Then around month three you’ll com…
Decentralized reputation is one of the most sought after prizes in the cypherpunk community: to invent a censorship-resistant protocol to make and parse unforgeable trust relationships between…
Building a two-sided market is probably the hardest thing you can build as an entrepreneur. It's so hard that a few weeks ago, I organized a Marketplace