Quotes About Product

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 (see the chart on this page).

It's also important that the word innovation be understood broadly. Startups use many kinds of innovation: novel scientific discoveries, repurposing an existing technology for a new use, devising a new business model that unlocks value that was hidden, or simply bringing a product or service to a new location or a previously underserved set of customers. In all these cases, innovation is at the heart of the company's success.

The word pivot sometimes is used incorrectly as a synonym for change. A pivot is a special kind of change designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, business model, and engine of growth.

The parent organization has to make it clear who the innovator is and make sure the innovator receives credit for having brought the new product to life—if it is successful.

Teams steeped in traditional product development methods are trained to make go/kill decisions on a regular basis. That is the essence of the waterfall or stage-gate development model.

The CEO and VP of product, instead of building their business, are engaged in the drudgery of solving just one customer's problem.

first answer four questions: Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve? If there was a solution, would they buy it? Would they buy it from us? Can we build a solution for that problem?

What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget? When I went home at the end of a day's work, the only things I knew for sure were that I had kept people busy and spent money that day.

Until we could figure out how to sell and make the product, it wasn't worth spending any engineering time on.

Our goal in building products is to be able to run experiments that will help us learn how to build a sustainable business. Thus, the right way to think about the product development process in a Lean Startup is that it is responding to pull requests in the form of experiments that need to be run.

The viral coefficient measures how many new customers will use a product as a consequence of each new customer who signs up. Put

Split testing often uncovers surprising things. For example, many features that make the product better in the eyes of engineers and designers have no impact on customer behavior.

This is an old direct marketing technique in which customers are given the opportunity to preorder a product that has not yet been built. A smoke test measures only one thing: whether customers are interested in trying a product. By itself, this is insufficient to validate an entire growth model. Nonetheless, it can be very useful to get feedback on this assumption before committing more money and other resources to the product.

engineers agree to adapt the product to the business's constantly changing requirements but are not responsible for the quality of those business decisions.

We really did have customers in those early days—true visionary early adopters—and we often talked to them and asked for their feedback. But we emphatically did not do what they said. We viewed their input as only one source of information about our product and overall vision. In fact, we were much more likely to run experiments on our customers than we were to cater to their whims.

As new mainstream customers are acquired and new markets are conquered, the product becomes part of the public face of the company, with important implications for PR, marketing, sales, and business development. In most cases, the product will attract competitors: copycats, fast followers, and imitators of all stripes.

This is the kind of storytelling that takes place at most startup board meetings. Most milestones are built the same way: hit a certain product milestone, maybe talk to a few customers, and see if the numbers go up. Unfortunately, this is not a good indicator of whether a startup is making progress. How do we know that the changes we've made are related to the results we're seeing? More important, how do we know that we are drawing the right lessons from those changes?

we figure out what we need to learn and then work backwards to see what product will work as an experiment to get that learning.

The question is not "Can this product be built?" In the modern economy, almost any product that can be imagined can be built. The more pertinent questions are "Should this product be built?" and "Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?" To

Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn't matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible.

Dropbox needed to test its leap-of-faith question: if we can provide a superior customer experience, will people give our product a try? They believed—rightly, as it turned out—that file synchronization was a problem that most people didn't know they had. Once you experience the solution, you can't imagine how you ever lived without it.

Once the baseline has been established, the startup can work toward the second learning milestone: tuning the engine. Every product development, marketing, or other initiative that a startup undertakes should be targeted at improving one of the drivers of its growth model.

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty

Thus, it is not the customer, but rather our hypothesis about the customer, that pulls work from product development and other functions. Any other work is waste.