Commentary, no it’s Noise
The other day I wrote that what’s most important for a successful startup is:
…finding a product-market fit…. Everything else is just commentary.
and I stand by the first portion of that statement.
However, I sort of take issue with myself on the second portion: is everything else commentary or noise?
The more I think about it, the answer is noise.
Think about the post I wrote last week about getting started with Lean Startups. Or, likewise, the one about how to create a successful blog. Both of these had to do with cutting through the noise and paying attention to what’s most important.
Keeping your eyes on the prize, as they say.
Often, when we talk about building startups, or technology, or social media, we get carried away with so many ideas and details. It gets confusing and noisy…we get mixed up with Methodology X or Philosophy Y or Practice Z. All of these methodologies and philosophies and practices serve a purpose, and that’s what we often forget.
Simply put, we confuse ourselves and lose the forest for the trees.
Scott, I think you’re defining and re-defining your point of view because you are both a CTO and an Entrepreneur.
From an Entrepreneur point of view, product-market fit is the right answer, but then there is the “how” part, and that’s a different hat.
A CTO should care about methodology, philosophy, practice, pattern and how to take the vision into reality, following the directives the CEO has decided.
A VP of Engineering should care about language, source control, bug tracking, development environment, etc., following the directions the CTO wants to go.
A Senior Engineer should worry about which library to use, what the table schema will be, what protocol will be used to execute on the components and features decided by the CTO and VP of Engineering.
And that’s just the Technology side of things. There is the Marketing, Sales, BizDev, HR, Operations, Finance, Support, etc.
Each one has to own their piece of the pyramid, be influenced by the “next level”, but not have to worry about it.
In other words, in a well-functional company, the Senior Developer should not be worrying about product-market fit, because the CEO already has found that, or is in the right direction to prove that it exists.
Of course, on a lot of startups you have just 1-4 people, and most of them have to wear all the hats, all at once, and here’s where some people strive and some flounder. Can you write the jQuery code to animate a deletion of an item, think about a viral feature user experience, decide on which cloud computing technology to use, do a customer focus group and talk to investors to raise money all at the same time?
Marcelo Calbucci
1 Apr 10 at 10:02 am
I think about it from a company perspective, not a CTO or entrepreneur perspective.
If a company hasn’t achieved product-market fit, how does choice of technology makes any difference to it’s success?
To me, it seems that the critical factor in their success is the pace at which they can iterate and adapt to market conditions.
As a result, the only part of “how” that is important is speed. The determining factor here is not inherent to the platform, but to the development team.
I should add a caveat to all this which is that my point of view applies most directly to web-based applications.
scottporad
1 Apr 10 at 4:40 pm