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On Not Bending to Customers' Whims by Katharine Nevins  (blog:  http://katharinenevins.posterous.com/ ) The goal for any startup (or product manager for that matter) is to build a product which customers need and love.  It’s easy to call yourself or your company customer-centric, but actually doing what is best for customers isn’t always straightforward or intuitive.  There are two main reasons why listening to customers doesn’t inevitably lead to good products.  Firstly, not all customers need or want the same thing.  Secondly, customers often do a poor job of knowing or articulating what they want.  Fortunately, both of these problems are addressable. For most products, different customers will have different needs.   Power users have different needs from new users: Sarah Dillard points out that Quora’s integration of feature requests from its power users have led to a bewildering experience for new users.  Different user segments may ...

by Mark Datta Author’s note:  Few things reinforce a concept so well as light parody, so please read my post in this spirit. Credit for the Vegas theme goes to Joris Poort . I’m sitting on a flight to Vegas, deciding what to write this blog post about – so naturally my mind turns to the parallels between lean start-ups and gambling strategy. Up and down the Strip, you’ll find gamblers who believe they have the system to make money in Vegas…guaranteed. That’s what Burrell Smith would call a ‘ reality distortion field ’. As most statisticians will tell you, there is indeed a way to pretty much guarantee a profit – and that’s to be the casino. That’s basically being Google or Facebook, where you run the platform and set the rules of the game. But let’s consider the more interesting situation of an aspiring professional gambler who lands in Vegas for the first time, with a few thousand bucks in his wallet and a big idea. He’s smart enough to realize that he has no chance to compete i...

by James Matthews An observation that has frequently surfaced in our Launching Technology Ventures course centers on an apparent inconsistency in the behavior of some start-ups, who claim to espouse the principals of User Centered Design but do not always practice what they preach. I will single out Dropbox as the poster-child of this observation. For those of you not familiar with it, Dropbox is a service that allows you to automatically sync a folder of files online and across your computers. Dropbox pays a great deal of attention to its users. Externally, a prominent feature on their website is the Votebox , where users can request and vote on the features that they would like to see added to the product. Having heard Drew Houston speak, I can also tell you that internally a significant portion of their attention is dedicated to working out how users interact with their product. They do focus groups, they analyze usage data – all the usual elements of the feedback loop a lean start...

by Joris Poort  In a hypothesis-driven lean start-up environment, lean theory recommends maximizing your learning from customers while minimizing effort.  While the theory sounds great, if lean startups follow lean principles blindly it could lead to unintentionally bland results.  More specifically, if the product vision is truly inspired, lean approaches can drive the development path away from a disruptive new solution and gravitate more toward incremental improvements upon existing products. Lean methodologies can stifle innovation Lean principles originated in the manufacturing environment to help reduce waste and focus on value-added activities.  In manufacturing environments however, lean principles are typically only implemented once both the production processes and product are very well defined.  In contrast, in the R&D lab lean principles can inhibit collaboration, creativity and innovation.  To be sure, there are certainly ways to improve th...