Teague Hopkins

Mindful Product Management

Teague Hopkins

Certainty in Lean Startups

Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) are experiments, but not the kind you learned in school. You won’t get statistically significant results that could be published in a peer-reviewed journal – but you will get the kind of information that can help you make a choice about your next move.

Photo by Todd Klassy

In business, the scientific method doesn’t give you proof or absolute certainty. It doesn’t make the decision for you. It does reduce uncertainty to let you place smarter bets. A small amount of data can get you from 50/50 to 25/75, and that’s a big difference.

If you think of starting a company as playing blackjack, then lean startup is counting cards. You still have to make the bet, and you’re still going to lose sometimes. But by playing smarter – by making a series of small bets, and betting bigger when you’re more certain of the outcome – you can tilt the odds of winning in your favor.

The Founding Trio

Three Feline Founders. Photo by amanky.

Dave McClure of 500 Startups calls it the holy trinity of startup founders. The frequent mantra in the startup space is that there are three primary types of founders: hackers, hustlers, and designers. The prevailing wisdom is that you should have one of each of these on your founding team. But we don’t often talk about what constitutes each of these archetypes.

Hackers

Hackers are not simply code monkeys. They need to be able to do more than just code well. Comfort with ambiguity and an understanding for coding in that context is invaluable for the hacker-founder. Many programmers are happier simply building what they’ve been told to build, but the good entrepreneurs are those who think about what happens when the requirements change – and code as if they will. This means building some things quick and dirty, and accepting that there will be some technical debt incurred in favor of rapid iteration.

Communication skills are also critical for hacker-founders. To achieve company success beyond personal success, you need to be able to communicate a vision to other technical team members and to translate for your non-technical co-founders. Likewise, some comfort with project management is valuable. Finally, any good programmer should understand how their outcomes tie to the success of the business. For programmers working for others, this is the way you communicate your worth; for hacker-founders, this is how you prioritize, test, and iterate for your startup.

Hacker-founders are not the only ones who need these skills, but the reality that there is far less supply than demand for excellent technical co-founders may tempt many non-technical folks to overlook these gaps in their search for a technical co-founder. If all you’re looking for is a code monkey, don’t make them a co-founder; just hire them on a contract basis until you can attract someone who has the complete package.

Hustlers

Hustlers are usually the business development specialists in a startup. It is important to note that this is not the same as an “ideas person.” Ideas people are thinkers; hustler-founders are doers. In a startup, anyone who fails to contribute anything beyond ideas is dead weight and should be cut loose at the earliest opportunity. Hustlers are the ones making deals happen, talking to customers or partners, raising funding to extend the runway, and generally removing obstacles for the rest of the team. Hustler-founders need to be resilient in the face of an endless stream of “no” and tireless in their pursuit of opportunities to promote the company.

Designers

When we talk about designer-founders, most people think about web design or mobile app design, but these are not the most important skills. What startups really need is UX designers, not graphic designers. This point gets lost because many designer-founders have both sets of skills. But make no mistake: this role is not about making your product pretty. It’s about making your product enjoyable and effective. Designer-founders should have extensive experience with problem solving and a disciplined approach to understanding the customer’s problem and designing for the customer’s interactions and experiences with the solution.. Designer-founders might approach this task from perspectives including design thinking, lean startup, user experience design, ethnographic research, or some other school of thought. The important part is that the designer-founder focuses on creating an complete end-to-end experience for the customer, not just the gloss that covers it.

A little of column A, a little of column B…

Few roles fit squarely into one of these categories without overlapping with the others, and any early startup employee needs to be prepared to tackle any challenges that arise. However, if your founding team has the right mix of skills to cover each of these three areas, it will give you a better chance of overcoming challenges and ultimately building a sustainable company.

A Better Website in One Afternoon

Photo by vincen-t on Flickr

There’s a simple experiment you can run in a single afternoon that will give you all the information you need to improve the website for your restaurant or bar. Most bar and restaurant websites are terrible. This is almost a mantra in the web design community. Running a great restaurant doesn’t require having the skills to create a great website, but a good website also doesn’t require hiring an expensive firm to design and build your site. Visual designs are time-consuming and often need some technical knowledge to carry out but you can create a perfectly acceptable visual design based on a customizable template. A great website might take expertise, but it only takes a little to take a bad website and make it good enough.

The biggest gain (and best way to set yourself apart) is not how your site looks, but how it makes the user feel. User experience (UX) matters and it’s not hard to be just a little better than your competition.

The Simple UX Experiment

  1. Recruit 5 potential customers from your local Craigslist board (offer cash or a discount or voucher for a meal at your restaurant).
    2. [box type=”tick”] Example
    Come spend 10 minutes helping us test our Thai restaurant’s website. We’ll give you a voucher for $20 off a meal to use whenever you like. Respond by email with your availability and we’ll let you know where to show up.[/box] [box type=”alert”]Don’t reveal the name of your restaurant. You don’t want people to become familiar with your website until you can watch the process.[/box]
  2. Stagger arrival times by 15 minutes to give yourself time to reset between test subjects. When your first volunteer arrives, sit them down in front of a computer and tell them the name of your restaurant. See if they can find your website on the first try. [box type=”tick”]Explain to your volunteer that you’d like them to speak their process out loud, stream of consciousness style, so that you can understand where they hit problem spots.[/box]
  3. Ask them to try to find your restaurant’s address on the website. See how much time and how many clicks it takes. Pay attention to how long they spend deciding which links to click, and see if they make mistakes or get frustrated.
  4. Ask them to find a menu on your site. See if they can find and open the menu. See if they get confused or lost if they are downloading a PDF.
  5. Ask them to make a reservation. See if they use an online reservation service (if you have one) or if they find a phone number to call.
  6. BONUS: Ask them to try each of these tasks on a smart phone or other mobile device.

Going through this process with 5 volunteers will take you less than 2 hours and only $100 (or less if you’ve offered vouchers). The insights gained from actually watching your customers struggle with your website will uncover the most common barriers that are keeping visitors to your website from becoming visitors to your restaurant. As an added benefit, even customers who succeeded at using the old website will be happier with the improved user experience. A few simple changes can make a big difference.

Culture Camp DC Recap

Culture Camp DC was this weekend. We had an amazing group of attendees, fantastic sessions, brilliant ideas, and some great discussions.

CultureCamp-407x64

Photos

Photos from the event are available on Google+.

Blog Posts

In keeping with the spirit of an unconference, we’ll leave it to the attendees to tell you what they thought of Culture Camp DC. Here are two blog posts about the event written by our attendees.

Creating a vision or aspirational model for what you want your organization to be like as a persona by Paul Boos

Culture Camp DC: Innovation, Tinker Toys, and the Downside of Early Success by Brenna Cammeron

Twitter

You can also find discussions and live tweets from participants under hashtag #culturedc or by following @CultureCampDC on twitter.

Thanks to Motley Fool for hosting; Chad, Elliot, Paul, and Leah for helping put the event together; and to all our attendees for making the day great.

6 Smart Ways to Innovate Inside Your Corporate Culture (Guest Post at TLC Labs)

I’ve written a guest post for TLC Labs titled 6 Smart Ways to Innovate Inside Your Corporate Culture (originally at http://tlclabs.co/?p=734). I invite you to check it out, along with the rest of their fantastic blog about adopting lean startup methodologies and fostering a culture of innovation inside a 40-year old corporation.