Quotes About Strategy

a new breed of designers is developing brand-new techniques under the banner of Lean User Experience (Lean UX). They recognize that the customer archetype is a hypothesis, not a fact. The customer profile should be considered provisional until the strategy has shown via validated learning that we can serve this type of customer in a sustainable way.

The two most important assumptions entrepreneurs make are what I call the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis.

What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.

If a competitor can outexecute a startup once the idea is known, the startup is doomed anyway. The reason to build a new team to pursue an idea is that you believe you can accelerate through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop faster than anyone else can.

They had "achieved failure"—successfully, faithfully, and rigorously executing a plan that turned out to have been utterly flawed.

I was finally ready to turn to the last resort: talking to customers. Armed

pivot is a special kind of change designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, business model, and engine of growth.

Si yo eligiera un empleado al azar de cualquier nivel, departamento o región, y ese empleado tuviera una idea absolutamente brillante que abriera una fuente de crecimiento radicalmente nueva, ¿qué tendría que hacer para llevar su idea a la práctica? ¿Dispone la empresa de las herramientas de gestión necesarias para ampliar esa idea a fin de que genere el máximo impacto, aun cuando no se ajuste a ninguna de las líneas de negocio actuales?

too many startup business plans look more like they are planning to launch a rocket ship than drive a car. They prescribe the steps to take and the results to expect in excruciating detail, and as in planning to launch a rocket, they are set up in such a way that even tiny errors in assumptions can lead to catastrophic outcomes.

Startups also have a true north, a destination in mind: creating a thriving and world-changing business. I call that a startup's vision. To achieve that vision, startups employ a strategy, which includes a business model, a product road map, a point of view about partners and competitors, and ideas about who the customer will be. The product is the end result of this strategy

The next few months are where the true story of IMVU begins, not with our brilliant assumptions and strategies and whiteboard gamesmanship but with the hard work of discovering what customers really wanted and adjusting our product and strategy to meet those desires. We adopted the view that our job was to find a synthesis between our vision and what customers would accept; it wasn't to capitulate to what customers thought they wanted or to tell customers what they ought to want.

A startup's job is to (1) rigorously measure where it is right now, confronting the hard truths that assessment reveals, and then (2) devise experiments to learn how to move the real numbers closer to the ideal reflected in the business plan.

we think we can truly short-circuit the ramp by killing things that don't make sense fast and doubling down on the ones that do.

companies using the sticky engine of growth track their attrition rate or churn rate very carefully. The churn rate is defined as the fraction of customers in any period who fail to remain engaged with the company's product.

A head start is rarely large enough to matter, and time spent in stealth mode—away from customers—is unlikely to provide a head start. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

This led to some frustrating board meetings at which we could show great product "progress" but not much in the way of business results.

I recommend several tactics for escaping the Five Blames. The first is to make sure that everyone affected by the problem is in the room during the analysis of the root cause.

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Our goal in building products is to be able to run experiments that will help us learn how to build a sustainable business.

A pivot requires that we keep one foot rooted in what we've learned so far, while making a fundamental change in strategy in order to seek even greater validated learning. In

Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

Entrepreneurship is a kind of management.

dot-com flameouts that erroneously believed that they could lose money on each customer but, as the old joke goes, make it up in volume.

Everything that has been discussed so far is a prelude to a seemingly simple question: are we making sufficient progress to believe that our original strategic hypothesis is correct, or do we need to make a major change? That change is called a pivot: a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.