The Mobile Spoon

As startups building new products, our primary goal is to move  from 0 to 1 .  In the effort to onboard our first customers, we will do whatever is necessary to engage with them, attract them, and turn them into  hard-activated users .  As your product starts to see its first wave of users, it's important to remember that these users are not necessarily your ideal customers . In fact, they probably fall into the category of early adopters , which means they are very different than the majority of users.  A product cannot exist without early adopters, and yet, it’s crucial to understand how they differ from the rest because you're about to base your next product decisions on their behavior and feedback in your quest for a product/market fit , and you don't want those decisions to be based on biased information.   Let's start with who your early adopters are:  According to  Everett Rogers : early adopters belong to 2 small groups tha...

  Here’s a little thing that sat in my drafts for a while: it’s a simple planning framework that we used to work with, back at ClickSoftware (now Salesforce ).  It focuses on breaking down a big challenge (or a goal) into smaller challenges (or outcomes) before diving into the actual tasks, and it's a pretty good technique when dealing with product roadmaps or strategic plans that spread across multiple teams. The credit goes to Professor Moshe BenBassat , the founder and CEO of the company, and a great innovator. He took the well known  “Stepwise Refinement” problem-solving method  (not to be confused with scrum's product backlog refinement ) and turned it into a useful planning tool, which I still use whenever I need to organize my thoughts and turn a big problem into a concrete plan.  What the heck is Stepwise Refinement?  The original stepwise refinement framework works as follows:  Start with the initial problem statement Break it into a few gen...

A minimum viable product (MVP) is often perceived as a subset of the real product: a minimized version, lacking some features or missing some UI fine-tunes, but in fact, an MVP is more of a tool to test the core idea of what’s intended to be a product someday. While the name MVP suggests that it has to be both a product and a viable thing - the software industry has proven it doesn’t have to be the case.  In fact, an MVP doesn’t have to be a product at all: it can be an email, a Facebook group, a service, or a bunch of processes performed manually. An MVP is there to help you test your business riskiest assumptions, see if your product can provide enough value to attract customers, and collect some feedback that can guide you through the product development. And last, people should be willing to pay for it (with real money or some level of commitment) - otherwise, it’s just theoretical exercise that cannot prove that the idea is...