The Shift
Posted at 18 Jul 2011
This Monday, according to my work log, I spent 5.5 hours on brainstorm sessions. On product, business and design, I chatted with different people on or not on my team to find the golden point of the next breakthrough. This is the beauty of working on a start-up: you come up with a bright idea, and work your ass off, and then you come back again to the meeting room to find the next iteration to work on. This cycle is never repetitive. In contrast, it always uses the strongest mental power to achieve goals.
Usually the process of the product iteration is the process of shifting focus on different market segments. When you first start up, you usually look at the product-founder-passion-market fit (please search Hacker News if you haven’t heard such phrases or only have heard about product-market fit) and choose the best entry to access your early adopter group. A few months later, you will start to realize that the team needs to move on to attack a bigger or an upper-stream niche. It lands naturally on the problem how you can build features upon the current model to serve the new segment. In this sense, you want to keep the core components of the product really strong and flexible to be able to support unexpected changes.
As I wrote in my personal diary,
Great ideas don’t come out of nothing. They usually happen after thousands of attempts, some of which seem stupid and meaningless. Putting together a strong fighter team and having them execute on (agreed) ideas will make us leap forward to the next level.
I shared some big slides on the weekly morning meeting to the team. I hope they can share some of what I have been thinking (and sometimes struggling) over the course of creating value in this wave of technology evolution. I hope we are all in.