One of the notable concepts to emerge from Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco this year, has been the notion of differential privacy. As Wired puts it Differential Privacy is the “…statistical science of trying to learn as much as possible about a group while learning as little as possible about any individual in it.”
The minimum viable product (MVP) is a powerful concept that allows you to test your ideas. It is not to be confused with the minimal marketable product (MMP), the product with the smallest feature set that still addresses the user needs and creates the right user experience. The MVP helps you acquire the relevant knowledge and address key risks; the MMP reduces time-to-market and enables you to launch your product faster. This post discusses both concepts, and it shows how you can use the minimum viable product to create a minimal marketable one.
With Project deadlines looming, stress is often a factor that project managers have to deal with, especially with the team they are managing, with a clear correlation between the level of stress indured and the quality of work produced, not to mention emotional endurance. Let’s face it, almost every project (most likely every project) is under the pump at one stage or another during the lifecycle, and duress is something, as a Project Manager, you certainly need to deal with.
With fixed resources, fixed time and budget, things tend to go awry, whether it is a strong dependency of a delivery from one team, a technical difficulty that cannot be resolved, scope changes, resource changes, and your job is to make sure things don’t go belly-up. Negative stress influences teams by de-optimizing their work efficiencies, resulting in lower-than-expected sprint velocities, dampen creativity and constructive thinking, resulting in mental fatigue, resulting in even simple coding errors creeping in.
There are of course specific PM courses of action you can take to address the problems, and this article isn’t about that, it’s more about how you can leverage your influence to act as a mentor, or guru to project positivity, in order to boost the morale of your team. Here are 3 Ways a PM can help the team De-stress.
Conflict Resolution Management is a skill that many trained project managers learn, when working with stakeholders, but something that young entrepreneurs never learn, until it really happens. In fact 62% of startups fail because of co-founder conflicts, and it’s something that really scares venture capitalists. In fact, there’s a saying in Silicon Valley that it’s better […]
Product Managers are inevitably fallible, and features you once thought would be something your customers would embrance, end up being ‘dead-wood’. That feature is not given nearly attention you have envisiged, and you decide to put it out to greener pastures. It happens, every company does it, big and small, like we just saw this […]
We have just talked about how to compose your board of directors, last post, but what about composing your board advisors? Broadly speaking, board of advisors serve to counsel you on matters based on their experience, whilst not being financially invested the same way your board of directors are. An advisory board is a body that provides […]
As a founder, one of the critical yet often overlooked tasks is forming your board of directors. Picking the right composition of your board is the difference between having a functional company that is productive and competitive, and those that are deadlocked and hampered by greedy, self-interested individuals that make the process of decision-making near-impossible. […]
A man I respect a lot, @guykawasaki, who has worked with Apple, Google and has been behind a lot of great venture projects under Garage Technology Ventures, evangelizes a great approach towards capturing the interested investor or investors, without over-burdening them with unnecessary crap. It’s called the 10|20|30 rule. Simply put, it means: 10 Slides in your presentation […]
Continuing on from my first article on what is Common Stock, we now move on to understanding what are Convertible Notes, in our quest towards understanding the lingo you will need when dealing with Venture Capitalists. What is a convertible note? As a founder in the early stages of your startup looking to get some cash to […]
In the startup-world, from conception to launch and acquisition, usually involves mass user acquisition, in order to increase brand value, and ultimately become a more attractive proposition for further investment, or even potential acquisition. Operating in such a competitive landscape, analytics has become a critical factor. Knowing and understanding app usage is crucial, understanding what features […]
