Author Updates
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Blog postThe Audi race team had the goal of winning the prestigious Le Mans race. Both their closest competitors, BMW and Mercedes, had won the race before which made the goal particularly worthy of pursuing.
The obvious way to win a race is by building a faster car. However, building a significantly faster car is non-trivial. The chief engineer at Audi instead posed a different question to his team:
“How can we win Le Mans if our car cannot go faster than anyone else’s”?
Audi -
Blog postAfter the introduction of the scientific method, there was a marked increase in the pace of breakthrough discoveries. Both science and entrepreneurship operate under conditions of extreme uncertainty, so the thinking goes that the adoption of some entrepreneurial method might do for business innovation what the scientific method did for scientific discoveries: dramatically accelerate the pace. This is the core message of the Lean Startup methodology.
The closest equivalent to a scient -
Blog postHappy Thanksgiving!
–Ash
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Blog postThe worst possible answer you can get to a question is: “It depends.”
It depends is often a cop out for fear of being proven wrong.
It is better to be prescriptive and wrong, than vague and right.
Getting a prescriptive answer leads to action which leads to learning.
An open ended answer simply extends action paralysis.
It depends is often a cop out for fear of not having enough information.
You need to come to terms that we never have perfect informa -
Blog postGot an interesting question on tradeoffs between pursuing
a paid channel (e.g. PPC) vs. partner channel (e.g. JV).
On the surface PPC may seem more expensive than partners,
but it’s not.
Partners trade on their social capital
which is often more valuable to them right now,
than your future promise of money.
People who do this professionally (like JVs) have to manage a tight promotions calendar
and need to ensure high quality so they don’t -
Blog postThe job of every business is to build a customer factory
that takes in unaware visitors as raw materials and
turns them into happy customers.
In this analogy, users represent work-in-progress inventory,
while customers represent finished products.
Excess inventory is a form of waste.
The goal of a system is to maximize throughput
while minimizing inventory.
The same is true of your customer factory.
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Blog postAn argument is a series of statements typically used to persuade someone of something or to present reasons for accepting a conclusion.
– Wikipedia
Arguments can be deductive or inductive.
Deductive arguments are based on premises
that aim to guarantee the truth of the conclusion.
While inductive arguments only support the probability of something being true.
Arguing from first-principles, as is done in science, are deductive arguments.
Most other -
Blog postI threw out the word “better” entrepreneur the other day
which I thought I’d clarify.
Some people choose to measure entrepreneurs
by the size of their exit or their net worth,
but that’s too shallow a definition.
There has to be a why beyond making money.
I liken the entrepreneurial journey to one of self-discovery with 3 stages:
1. The Artist Stage
It starts with a passion for creating something bold and different.
This is when yo -
Blog postGot an interesting question the other day on
when to transition from high touch customer development to all out online marketing.
How to go from 50 customers to 500 customers?
First, you don’t 10X by deciding to flick a switch.
Rather think of it a series of 2X leveling-up strategies.
Establishing repeatability is a prerequisite to pursuing growth.
If you can’t repeatably sign-up dozens of customers,
no amount of online marketing is going to h -
Blog postI am currently reading a fascinating book by Yuval Harari: Sapiens – A brief history of humankind.
Here’s are some particular excerpts that caught my attention:
For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. Only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – did man jump to the top of the food chain.
Whether Sapiens are to blame or not, no sooner had they arrived at a ne -
Blog postCompetition is a strange concept.
We can spin it to be all inclusive or all exclusive.
If Google is in the search business,
they have only a handful of “search” competitors.
If they are in the advertising business,
they have hundreds.
If Facebook is in the social networking business,
they too only have a handful of “social networking” competitors.
But if they are in the consumer attention business,
again there are hundreds of things th -
Blog postEvery grand strategy can be tested with one or more small, fast, additive experiments.
Internalize theses 7 Habits for running highly effective experiments:
1. Declare you expected outcomes upfront.
2. Make declaring outcomes a team sport.
3. Emphasize estimation not precision.
4. Measure actions versus words.
5. Turn your assumptions into falsifiable hypotheses.
6. Time-box your experiments.
7. Always use a control group.
Read more -
Blog postI am now getting asked this question: “How do I find a good problem to solve?”
A lot more than the usual: “What do you think of my idea?”
While progress, it’s still not a good question.
Don’t get me wrong.
I still consider it great progress in mind shift –
prioritizing problems over solutions,
and it is a step in the right direction.
But, the question is impossible to answer as asked.
With an open-ended question like that, the possible sol -
Blog postThe Note and Vote is a technique,
created by Google Ventures,
to help teams make group group decisions quickly.
Each person gets a pen and some paper.
In five minutes (set a timer),
they write down as many ideas as they can,
without discussing with anyone else.
Next, a timer is set for two minutes.
Everyone picks one or two of their favorite items from the list.
Then, each member says their best idea aloud,
without any justific -
Blog postDoes this make sense?
If not, how can it be improved?
Drop me a note, tweet, or leave a comment.
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Blog postWhile experiments are highly effective at testing guesses,
the output of your experiments is only going to be as good
as the quality of your input guesses.
Furthermore, running experiments does not automatically
lead to new insights.
Many experiments simply invalidate a bad idea
and leave you stuck.
This begs the question:
“Where do good guesses or ideas come from?”
The answer is that good ideas can come from anywhere.
In order -
Blog postA LEAN sprint is a time-boxed iteration cycle for sourcing, ranking, and testing new ideas for moving your business model forward.
If you come from a software background, you have most likely been exposed to the scrum/agile methodology. LEAN sprints are heavily influenced by agile and scrum practices and also employ stand-ups, sprint planning, and sprint review meetings, but there are some key differences.
1. The goals are different
While the goal of a scrum sprint is de -
Blog postI broadly divide experiments into two categories:
Learning experiments and throughput experiments.
The difference between these experiment types is the goal.
Even though the build-measure-learn loop ends with learning,
The goal of a lean startup isn’t just learning,
But turning learning into measurable business results – aka traction.
The goal of every experiment should be testing
a bigger strategy for increasing traction
by running throughp -
Blog postYour goal should be exposing your problems to your team
without biasing them with possible solutions.
Each team member should then be encouraged
to individually brainstorm possible solutions
before sharing their ideas with the team.
This is a highly effective Design Thinking technique, popularized by IDEO,
that both avoids group-think and also ensures the largest diversity of ideas.
“During divergence we are creating choices and during convergen -
Blog postA disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market that eventually displaces an existing market. Both startups and innovative companies thrive in this space. This type of innovation typically requires starting with a clean slate and completely rethinking the customer-problem-solution hypotheses. This is where the Lean Canvas shines.
In contrast to disruptive innovation, a sustaining innovation does not create new markets but rather evolves existing ones with bette -
Blog postI often get asked for selling points for lean –
usually by an internal corporate employee
seeking permission from management.
Instead of pitching the merits of the methodology,
and/or buying books and/or training for everyone,
Go find an “ideal” project instead and demonstrate results.
When you quietly deliver value to customers
in 4 weeks versus 4 months,
Your management and peers can’t help but notice
which is the first battle.
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Blog postInstead of thinking in terms of your business model’s
maximum upside potential (like the 1% market share goal),
it’s more helpful to think in terms of time-boxed minimum success criteria.
Your minimum success criteria is the smallest outcome that would deem the project a success for you X years from now.
-
Blog postWe often draw the hockey stick curve as a smooth curve
but if you zoom in you’ll find that
it isn’t so smooth after all.
It is made up of a series of steps.
Think of these steps as firing rockets
that get you from one stable orbit to the next.
Each of these firing rockets or growth hacks eventually burn out
and need to constantly replaced with new ones.
Each step or firing rocket represents a sub-strategy
that got the business model -
Blog postOn writing well:
“Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.”
“Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.”
“The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.”
“Thinking -
Blog postOn the one hand, your team needs to be empowered.
To do whatever is needed to achieve the goal.
If they have to constantly get permission
to test ideas, that will affect their speed of implementation.
But the other extreme of granting them full autonomy is dangerous too.
Left unchecked, our passion (or bias) for the solution
always finds a way to rear it’s ugly head.
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Blog postI am about to cross the international dateline
which means I’m about to lose a day
just like that.
Not to worry, I’ll get it back
much the same way.
It’s only fitting to share a few of my favorite time quotes:
===
“I am time, the destroyer of all.”
– Krishna
“To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.”
– Leonard Bernstein
“There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you wa -
Blog postWe have been trained to build products
by organizing ourselves into specialized teams or departments
for the sake of efficiency and scale.
But when operating under conditions of extreme uncertainty,
this kind of specialization can be a curse.
The work flow in an organization is a system of interconnected steps.
When this work is done in silos and/or
under different sets of departmental KPIs (key performance indicators),
you run the risk of -
Blog post“The value of a communication system grows at approximately the square of the number of users of the system.”
– Metcalfe’s Law
Metcalfe’s Law has a corollary when it comes to project teams:
The efficiency of a team is approximately the inverse of the square of the number of members in the team.
—Marc Hedlund
As a team grows in size, communication breaks down and devolves into group think.
A good rule of thumb on the right team size is instituting a tw -
Blog postThink of intrapreneurship as launching an exploratory probe into space.
If you shoot out too far,
you will get lost, eventually run out of resources,
and die a quiet death.
Even if you do manage to return,
you will probably bring back something
so unrecognizable to the core business
that you will be killed off by some Vice President.
The key to success is not aiming for deep space,
but aiming to orbit a specific target (albeit fuzzy) -
Blog postWe have been trained to build products a certain way.
We organize ourselves into specialized teams (or departments)
that focus on different aspects of the innovation process.
On the one hand, such specialization is required for the efficiency of work.
But this kind of specialization can also be a curse.
Especially when deliverables are created in silos and
under different sets of KPIs (or key performance indicators).
I am not going to weigh in on<
Books by Ash Maurya
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