Resources for product teams from industry experts.
If there is money to be made, new firms will enter the market, increase supply, drive prices down, and thereby eliminate the profits that attracted them in the first place. If too many firms enter the market, they’ll suffer losses, some will fold, and prices will rise back to sustainable levels. Under perfect competition, in the long run, no company makes an economic profit.
— Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
In the red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Here, companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand. As the market space gets crowded, prospects for profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities, and cutthroat competition turns the red ocean bloody.
Blue oceans, in contrast, are defined by untapped market space, demand creation, and the opportunity for highly profitable growth. Although some blue oceans are created well beyond existing industry boundaries, most are created from within red oceans by expanding existing industry boundaries. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set.
— Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne, et al.
I’ve met dozens of teams who have never talked to customers because they believe they aren’t allowed to. However, they regularly engage with customers outside of work. They work for a major bank, and most (if not all) of their friends have a bank account. They build sales software, and their best friend’s dad works in sales. They work on hospital badge systems, and they have three clinicians in their extended family. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Get started by talking to anyone who is like your customers. Iterate from there.
— Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value by Teresa Torres
I would never write anything that suggests the path to success is a continuum of positive, even euphoric experiences — that if you do all the right things everything will work out. Frequently it doesn’t; often you crash and burn. This is part and parcel of pursuing and achieving very ambitious goals. It is also one of the profound lessons I have learned during my career, namely, that even when you have an organization brimming with talent, victory is not always under your control.
Rather, it’s like quicksilver — fleeting and elusive, not something you can summon at will even under the best circumstances. Almost always, your road to victory goes through a place called failure.
— The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, et al.
As anyone who’s launched a product or business under conditions of extreme uncertainty knows, it’s very difficult to make accurate forecasts about markets you’ve never played in before — or that may not even exist yet. Innovation accounting gives entrepreneurs and leaders a language for talking about progress in the years before revenue kicks in. And not only that — it allows you to actually translate your learning into numbers your finance colleagues and investors can understand.
Having that shared language, and a shared system for showing progress, helps concretize the trust between leaders and entrepreneurial teams. Entrepreneurs and leaders agree to a set of metrics they believe are important to the success of a project. Entrepreneurs must show progress to be able to secure their next round of funding, and leaders agree to continue supporting the project as long as entrepreneurs can demonstrate that their strategy is working — or that they’re making the proper adjustments to their strategy based on their discoveries.
— The Leader’s Guide by Eric Ries
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