Startup Product Management

As product managers and entrepreneurs, we know the importance of validating an idea before committing to getting it built. However, validation is easier said than done. In fact, it’s possibly one of the hardest things you will ever do in your product life cycle, otherwise products and startups wouldn’t have the abysmal 90%+ failure rate Read more »

The purpose of a business model is to concisely describe the function of your business within the overall market landscape. This includes details such as business inputs and dependencies, target customer base and the value being created on behalf of those customers. By using such a conceptual construct for evaluating a business, strategists are able Read more »

How do you know whether a product idea is going to succeed if you build it and take it to market?  If you’ve ever been part of a startup, or if your organization has launched a new line of products, you know how precarious the effort can be. Some would advocate using the ‘Lean’ method Read more »

Charles Adler is the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Kickstarter. He is an entrepreneur with over 14 years experience in interaction design. Formerly director of strategy and senior information architect at Agency.com, his work in user experience, design, and information architecture is driven by a commitment to all things clean and simple. Previously, he cofounded Read more »

Tom Hulme is Design Director at IDEO London, where he uses a human-centred innovation approach to design new businesses, and the founder of Open IDEO, an open innovation platform. A serial entrepreneur and angel investor, he has first-hand experience in building successful enterprises and, as a result, he has a thorough understanding of business. Hulme Read more »

It is all the rage to use 3rd party APIs in products, such as Twitter, Facebook Connect, DirectedEdge and more. APIs provide additional data or functionality such as user-authentication or product-recommendations. They can provide your product with fast access to data and features that would otherwise take a lot of resources and time to do yourself. Read more »

From the early days of PeerIndex we’ve been running as a (very) lean startup. This has taught me some lessons about the practice of Product Management in lean startup environments. This is less about the use of customer development tools and finding product market fit but rather about some tips and tricks that made my Read more »

Being a product manager in a data startup offers some interesting challenges. As more and more PMs work for data startups understanding these challenges will help PMs survive the strange world of data. There are two challenges that product managers in data startups face: Translating customer problems into analysis Presentation of data to customers Translation Read more »

The billion dollar start up Airbnb is in the midst of a battle for it’s brand reputation as stories of trashed homes are revealed in what has become known as #ransackgate. A lot has already been written about this, but most of the coverage has centred on the seemingly uncoordinated response from their customer support Read more »

On July 14th, Mini Seedcamp was held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and I went along as a mentor. As usual, Ljubljana and Slovenia put on a great experience with warm (very warm) weather, great food and fine wine along with the all-important wonderful startups. Our first meeting with the startups came in the form of 5 Read more »