Here’s our round up of the most useful business and (UX) strategy resources we’ve come across recently.
The most common mistake when forecasting growth for new products and how to fix it (Andrew Chen)
This is an excellent article that should be read by anyone trying to forecast growth for a new product. In it Andrew Chen stresses the importance of focusing on indicators that are specific to your product/business. Put simply avoid vanity metrics and instead:
- Start with inputs not lagging vanity metrics
- Show a series of steps that show how these inputs result in outputs
- And, how the inputs to the model would need to scale, in order to scale the output
In other words, rather than assuming a growth rate, the focus should be deriving the growth rate.
What do I do now? (Steve Blank)
Steve Blank uses a recent conversation with a former student to elaborate on the (often painful) steps successful start-ups must take before they become a large company.
Difficult conversations will grow your product (Intercom)
“An inherent challenge for all early stage startups is deciding whether to focus on growth or product/market fit.
It’s a false choice, as Rob Go says in his post about this conflict. They both matter. Recently I had two very positive but very different customer interactions that demonstrated the types of conversation that can help you focus on both.”
Fermi estimation for startup business models (A Smart Bear)
“Early in a company’s life, you don’t know anything. Often your best estimate of any metric or market behaviour or business model component is at best accurate within a power of ten, for example “expected conversion rate between 0.5% and 5%” or “cost to acquire a customer between $50 and $500″ or “average monthly revenue per customer between $20 and $200.”
Estimating with these extremely wide ranges can be surprisingly useful. In physics it’s called “Fermi Estimation.” It’s useful because it’s easy to get to a rough answer to important questions, but also ensures you don’t erroneously ascribe too much precision to the result.”
Objectives & Key Results (Medium)
“OKR is an abbreviation for Objective & Key Result. The concept was invented at the Intel Corporation and is widely used amongst the biggest technology companies in the world including Google and Zynga.
OKRs are meant to set strategy and goals over a specified amount of time for an organisation and teams. At the end of a work period, your OKRs provide a reference to evaluate how well you did in executing your objectives.”
Get our weekly roundups delivered straight to your inbox
Sign-up for our email newsletter and get all our posts by email as soon as they’re published.