Answer: Only one. One of the concepts we’re pushing hard in the Lean Analytics book is the One Metric That Matters (OMTM). The idea is this: at any given time in your business there’s one key metric you should be focusing on. Not two, or three, or four. Just one. And that one metric becomes […]
Discipline
Discipline is becoming my new favorite word. It’s the action-oriented word to the more generic “focus.” People struggle with focus, how to define it, and measure it. Discipline makes more sense. You know if you’re being disciplined or not –in everything you do– inside and outside of your startup. It’s pretty hard to lie to […]
Moving Towards a Continuous Integration and Deployment Process
Believing in continuous process improvement is one thing, implementing it is another story. But that’s part of the product manager’s job — to evaluate the processes you have in place for product development, find the trouble spots and try to fix them. In fact, that’s everyone’s job: standing by while things aren’t working is a […]
The Hustler
You spend enough time with enough startups and you genuinely come to appreciate the importance of The Hustler. The Hustler plays a few levels above where he* should, but gets away with it because of sheer willpower, ego and perceptivity. Tweet The Hustler learns the rules quickly — breaks those he needs to — and […]
Why I Blog
I’ve been blogging for a long time. I’m not as prolific as some, but I try and post weekly, and occasionally I do better than that. I’ve had long droughts too. Every once in awhile I ask myself, “Why do I blog, anyway?” As I’ve pointed out in the past, I can trace almost every […]
GoInstant To Be Acquired by Salesforce
So here’s some big, big news … GoInstant has agreed to be acquired by Salesforce. You can read our blog post about the news here: http://www.goinstant.com/goinstant-to-be-acquired-by-salesforce-com/. This is an incredible day for GoInstant, the team and for me personally. I joined the company back in October. I knew I was in for a ride; I […]
I’m Writing a Book with Alistair Croll: Lean Analytics (to be published by O’Reilly)
Often when giving presentations I have an introductory slide about myself that shows a timeline of my experience. Here’s an example: (Some presenters don’t need this sort of thing, I’m not quite that famous!) What’s most interesting to me about this slide is right at the very beginning in 1996. It says, “started writing online.” […]
There is No Risk
When I started Year One Labs (with Ray, Alistair and Ian), we spent a lot of time looking for founders. It took us six months to make five investments. During that time we spoke with, interviewed, and hung out with lots of people, looking for teams, but also looking for individuals that we thought had […]
The Role of Product Managers
I came across an interesting discussion on Branch about the role and future of product managers. I’m not a member there so I couldn’t respond directly, but figured I’d put my thoughts here instead. Yesterday the discussion only had a few comments on it. Today there are more and one of them is very similar […]
Moving to Halifax for GoInstant
In October 2011 I announced that I was joining GoInstant, which provides co-browsing technology to the enterprise. GoInstant is an awesome company. I’ve loved my experience there so far. We’ve made a ton of progress, learned a ton, and we’re putting our foot on the gas pedal. It has been, and will continue to be, […]
Founding Partner at 