RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

Treat a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is measured by number of users. As anyone who has tried to optimize software knows, the key is measurement. When you try to guess where your program is slow, and what would make it faster, you almost always guess wrong.

Number of users may not be the perfect test, but it will be very close. It’s what acquirers care about. It’s what revenues depend on. It’s what makes competitors unhappy. It’s what impresses reporters, and potential new users. Certainly it’s a better test than your a priori notions of what problems are important to solve, no matter how technically adept you are.

— Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham

Source: Amazon Kindle

Related Stories and Excerpts:

  1. Because a new service can provide people with an experience they have never had before, it is important to make it real and tangible. If you ask people to imagine a new service, they tend to become analytical and problem-oriented. On the other hand, when people are allowed to experience a working prototype—something tangible that contains the key elements of the touchpoints and flow of the service interactions—they may react to the performance rather than the abstract concept. — Service Design: From Insight to Implementation by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, et al. Source: Amazon Kindle […]
  2. So what do you do when there is a real need for a culture change “…”? Ideally, you introduce a new story while also valuing and honoring the old one. This is a little like having one brand identity while recognizing the power of the category essence. An organization’s fundamental story is usually derived from its product line, its founder, and early decisions that were made and encoded in an oral history that becomes its story. Over time, the company hires people who have the right chemistry—meaning that they live by the same story. You can introduce new stories, […]
  3. As companies tend to innovate faster than their customers’ needs evolve, most organizations eventually end up producing products or services that are actually too sophisticated, too expensive, and too complicated for many customers in their market. Companies pursue these ‘sustaining innovations’ at the higher tiers of their markets because this is what has historically helped them succeed: by charging the highest prices to their most demanding and sophisticated customers at the top of the market, companies will achieve the greatest profitability.” Among them are new technologies and platforms. — The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to […]
  4. Continuous transformation—an organization’s capability to test and learn from experiments having to do with its own structure and processes, promoting the best-proven techniques company-wide while limiting or discarding the rest—is what will give that organization the ability to thrive in the modern era. It’s my last suggestion as an addition to the toolbox of the entrepreneurial management function. Let’s formalize and systematize that approach, so that we build up a critical mass of like-minded entrepreneurs who can tackle the full heterogeneous range of challenges we’re likely to face in the twenty-first century and beyond. — The Startup Way: How […]
  5. The fundamental thing that I wish I’d known, is I underestimated the importance of simplicity and design. The first couple of years I really didn’t feel that, I didn’t have a good enough appreciation that the most important thing for consumer-facing software was that it was beautiful and simple, and people immediately and intuitively understood how to use it. It really wasn’t about making it more powerful, it was about making it more natural. I think I’ve only internalized that in the past couple of years and it’ll take another lifetime to really master it. — Startup Growth Engines: […]

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