From startup to scaleup: Strategies to achieve sustainable growth

In the fast-paced world of tech startups, the journey from idea to scaleup can be both exhilarating and daunting. I’ve had the privilege of navigating this exciting terrain multiple times. Now, I’m here to share some insights that have proven invaluable in achieving sustainable growth.

The company vision and mission are a North Star

When it comes to scaling a tech startup, one of the most critical factors is laying a strong foundation from the outset. This means having a clear vision and mission for your company, as well as a solid understanding of your target market and the problem you’re solving. Without this clarity, it’s easy to get lost in the noise and lose sight of your goals. Keep your focus on solving a real problem for your customers and creating value in the market. In our case, Bounce is in the business of making travel easier, and as we scale, each decision is always aligned with our mission.

Your team is everything

Another key aspect of sustainable growth is building a strong team. The right team is paramount to the success of a business. Your team is the voice and face of the company, and they are the ones executing your vision. Surround yourself with talented individuals who share your passion and vision, and empower them to contribute their unique skills and perspectives. A cohesive team that works well together can overcome obstacles and drive the company forward, even in the face of challenges.

Launch and iterate fast

It’s essential to prioritize continuous learning and innovation. The tech landscape is constantly evolving, and staying ahead of the curve requires a commitment to ongoing education and experimentation. Be willing to adapt and iterate as needed to build the best product possible for your users. When Bounce began, I wanted to make sure there was a market for our product and the fastest way I could prove that was to launch a landing page in NYC with my phone number on it. I got valuable customer feedback fast, and since then we’ve been building and shipping iteration after iteration to turn Bounce into the product it is today.

Be customer-obsessed

You cannot scale successfully without focusing on customer feedback and iteration. Your customers are your greatest asset, and their insights can provide invaluable guidance for product development and improvement. If you build aggressively without integrating customer feedback into your offering, this might come back to bite you later. Actively seek out feedback, listen to what your customers have to say, and use that information to iterate and refine your products or services.

Don’t go it alone, partner instead

Strategic partnerships and collaborations can go a long way, especially when you haven’t built your brand yet, and are joining forces with a recognized brand in your industry. By forging alliances with complementary businesses or industry leaders, you can amplify your reach and accelerate your growth trajectory. Look for opportunities to collaborate with like-minded companies or organizations that share your values and can help you achieve your goals more quickly and efficiently.

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Design thinking in the age of artificial intelligence

The origins of design thinking

Brainstorming was invented in the 50s, and in the 60s a design training program was created at Stanford. A landmark book, "Design Thinking", published by MIT Press, was written by Peter Rowe. Design thinking is a project creation method developed at Stanford University in the USA in the 1980s by Rolf Faste. In 1991, Idéo popularized its methods, which focus on the customer experience, and the method was widely adopted.

In addition to technological solutions, the aim is to explore the user experience. Today, the term Ux Design is used to describe user experience design. The approach is based on two key principles.

The first principle is that of an iterative process, i.e. you can return to previous stages if the current one is inconclusive. This distinguishes design thinking from a linear project process.

The second principle lies in the cooperative operation of diverse, multi-disciplinary teams of different ages and experience at each stage. It should also be noted that design thinking is a process that places people at the heart of experimentation with new solutions, with a logic of rapid, methodical prototyping.

The 5 key stages of the design thinking method

The design thinking process is led by a "facilitator" or designer, who remains neutral and does not seek to influence participants.

Step 1 - Use empathy
In the manner of an anthropologist, this involves defining the target audience and obtaining a clear vision of the problems encountered by users and what they need. It's about understanding their context, what they say they think and feel. Surveys and contextual immersion are the best solution, but it's also possible to fill in an "Empathy Map", organize a survey, lead a focus group or conduct a user test, meet users in the street, or create personas that embody users.

Step 2 - Diagnosis
In this stage, the aim is to understand the nature of the challenge, the points of friction and the problems faced by users, for example, by establishing a "user journey" or experience map, or based on critical incidents. The aim is to identify what is minimum, what is normal and what would be a real break in the service provided.

Step 3 - Build the concept
Create the concept that will deliver the solution using a diverse team to generate a wealth of ideas, based on 3 stages

-Ice-breaking games within the group, to express personal feelings.

-Brainstorming to stimulate creativity (here 20 methods). During this stage, it's possible to propose new constraints or change the rules along the way, to get the group out of its routine,

-The selection of the best viable, feasible ideas according to the criteria and constraints set out in the diagnosis.

Step 4 - Prototyping
The prototyping stage consists of moving as quickly as possible towards the materialization of a solution, and expressing it in creative form using a drawing (poster, metaphor, figurative drawing, plan), in the form of a cut-out, a digital model, an assembly for example, or even in the form of a video and its more or less complex storyline ranging from a hero's journey to a novel-like composition.

The prototype can also be a role-playing game or a theatrical stage on which to play out the imagined solutions. Whatever its form, the prototype aims for simplicity and rapidity. It needs to be usable quickly enough to be understood by users and to benefit from their feedback. It doesn't need to be aesthetic or functional at this stage. Its function is to suggest the solution in preparation

Step 5 Testing
The testing stage consists of exposing the prototypes to users to understand what they think, feel and are motivated by. If the design thinking session takes place with several teams, a pre-test crossing the opinions of the teams is possible. It's also possible to address a prototype to a mass of online users and circulate it to receive a variety of opinions in rapid iteration. This is known as crowdtesting. This solution is particularly well-suited to software or any other digital solution.

Finally, in the testing stage, AI can be used to collect and analyze user feedback in an automated way. Chatbots and semantic analysis systems enable a deeper understanding of user reactions, but again, AI cannot always interpret human emotions with the same precision as a human being.

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3 Ways Businesses Can Transition to a Product-Led Growth Model

The rise of product-led growth (PLG) strategies is reshaping many aspects of modern businesses, from customer acquisition and retention to the way we create and build software. PLG is well-documented as an effective and profitable strategy given that 50 percent of software-as-a-service (SaaS) PLG companies hit $100 million annual recurring revenue within the first five years. Additionally, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75 percent of SaaS providers will implement product-led growth techniques to foster expansion among their existing customer bases.

PLG places the product itself at the center of a company’s growth model, rather than relying solely on traditional sales and marketing tactics. Companies like Stripe, Slack and Zoom have demonstrated the power of PLG via rapid scaling with relatively lean teams compared to traditionally sales-driven business models.

Rather than relying on large sales teams, companies could grow efficiently — despite macro-economic pressures and trends — by prioritizing the process of crafting an exceptional, user-centric product.

The Cultural Shift Behind Product-Led Growth

The shift to PLG is harder than it seems. It’s not just one singular action, but a cultural shift, moving away from a sales-first mentality to a product-first focus on delivering exceptional user experiences. Historically, companies like Salesforce and ServiceNow have allocated close to 40-50 percent of their spending to sales and marketing. Yet, with the rise of PLG, customer acquisition costs have come down significantly because the product leads the charge instead of a human.

In a traditional sales-led growth approach, the sales team, talent and processes are in the driver’s seat. Sales representatives must convince customers to buy a product or service through various tactics like campaigns, promotions and even relationship-building.

In contrast, a PLG strategy enables companies to prioritize product development and user adoption, both of which are equally vital to growth. An organization’s newfound relationship with the user means the product must be easy to learn, easy to use, easy to scale for the user’s needs, and perhaps most importantly, has to create value for the user quickly.

How to Transition to a Product-Led Growth Model

For those that are looking at the PLG strategy as an exciting opportunity but feel the cultural shift may be daunting, here are three ways businesses can transition to a PLG model.

Champion Product-First Thinking Across the Organization

In a PLG approach, product teams can no longer operate in isolation. They must collaborate closely with sales, marketing, and customer success because a modern, effective PLG strategy requires a holistic user experience at all stages of the journey, from initial adoption through ongoing usage and expansion.

Prioritize Your End Users and Their Feedback

Product-led companies put end users at the center of their strategy and build each feature with a specific user need in mind. This value-forward, user-oriented approach to product building makes for a more delightful product experience and a stickier use case. Along with this, consistently soliciting and incorporating user feedback is paramount with PLG. Modern analytics, onboarding and customer feedback tools have popped up to enable data sharing across the organization for a multitude of uses.

Empower Your Product as a Marketing Engine

With PLG, the product experience becomes a powerful marketing channel in and of itself. When users love a product, they naturally invite colleagues from their personal networks to try it out, similar to how Slack propagated virally. This organic, reputation-driven adoption reduces customer acquisition costs and emphasizes building a remarkable product over expensive sales and marketing campaigns.

PLG Leads the Way

Making the transition to PLG involves fundamental changes like placing product at the center of problem-solving, crafting artful user experiences and continuous iteration versus employing humans to mitigate poor product experiences.

At its core, PLG reorients an organization’s culture and problem-solving approach around developing innovative, user-centric products that sell themselves. This ethos of product craftsmanship transcends any specific growth strategy and will be imperative for businesses to thrive in increasingly competitive digital markets.

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TuringBots Will Transform The Software Development Lifecycle By 2028

Thanks to TuringBots (AI and generative AI for software development), software development is on the cusp of a transformative change, one that promises to redefine the way development teams collaborate, create, and deploy applications. Picture this: a room full of product owners, subject matter experts, testers, and developers, security and architecture pro’s, all working in harmony with the aid of advanced technology including voice and audio integration, digital boards and more. As each stakeholder expresses requirements, ideas, solutions, the TuringBots are listening, elaborating, generating. This is not a scene from a sci-fi movie; it’s the imminent future of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), projected to unfold by 2028. And it doesn’t have to happen in a (TuringBot) meeting room; it can all be happening on your desktop while you are sitting at your desk. TuringBots today can generate use cases, test cases, designs, code and many more sw assets from your requirements, and can automate pipelines to efficiently deliver those assets in production making it all happen in a few hours or even minutes.

The Invisible And Real-Time SDLC: A New Era Begins

Gone are the days of siloed development processes and delayed feedback loops. The future SDLC is seamlessly integrated and invisible, operating in real time. Teams will no longer face the barriers of traditional software development; instead, they will engage in dynamic collaboration with TuringBots — AI and generative AI entities capable of understanding spoken conversations, natural language text, and low-code and code in many programming languages, and furthermore even able to interpret sketches or ideas jotted down on a board.

Real-Time Reviews And Autonomous Evolution

The process of executing and reviewing development work will be dramatically expedited. Teams will be able to review their creations on the fly, conduct code checks, perform security reviews, and grant approvals in real time. Meanwhile, TuringBots will work in the background, autonomously evolving applications to meet emerging needs and fixing issues before they become problems. This paradigm shift is not merely about speeding up the development process; it’s about enhancing creativity, improving accuracy, and ensuring security in ways we’ve only begun to imagine. By enabling all collaboration and asset generation to occur instantaneously, tested and checked by an ever-vigilant, combined team of humans and TuringBots, the development of new applications will reach speeds previously thought impossible.

The Unimaginable Speed Of App Development

As we look toward this future, it’s clear that the role of developers and IT professionals will evolve. The focus will shift from manual coding to strategic oversight and from problem-solving to creative innovation. TuringBots, with their ability to operate behind the scenes with other TuringBots and collaborate with humans, will become an indispensable ally, ensuring that the SDLC can keep pace with the rapid rate of technological change and the ever-growing demands of consumers and businesses alike.

Architect Approach to TuringBot Concerns

There are still concerns with the development of TuringBots, including hallucination, custom software development and architecture enterprise requirements, and the need to adapt to the changing landscape. To harness the power of TuringBots, teams must prioritize prompt engineering and learn to leverage new technologies such as vector embedding and retrieval augmented generation. Teams have to incorporate architecture and architects into generative AI and enforce security by design through Zero Trust principles, enhanced testing and security policies, and minimum-viable security.

Wrapping It All Up

The vision of an invisible and real-time SDLC facilitated by TuringBots is not a distant dream but an impending reality. By 2028, software development as we know it today will undergo a radical transformation, enabling teams to build new applications at previously unimaginable speeds. This future promises not only to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the development process but also to open up new possibilities for innovation and creativity in software creation.

The original content of the note was published on Forbes.com. To read the full note visit here

How Organizations Can Implement Agile Development At Scale

Agile product management is becoming an increasingly important approach to developing products that have transformative potential and meet market needs. However, while many business leaders recognize the value of Agile, there are often flaws in Agile implementation that keep product management processes from truly being agile.

Fundamental Agile Pillars

Many companies that implement Agile lack two fundamental pillars necessary to truly be considered Agile.

One of these pillars is culture. A company must understand what the objectives of Agile are and what agility means in their organization before implementing it.

The second pillar is the issue of letting go of ingrained processes. When an organization struggles to adapt to new practices, it can result in mixing Agile with other forms of development, such as waterfall. This ultimately causes delays and impacts quick decision-making.

Agile At Scale—How To Achieve Maximum Value

Agile is something that requires buy-in from the whole organization. There are often knowledge gaps within organizations where members of the team, from the CEO to the finance team, don’t fully know how their Agile practices work and assume that it is solely in the hands of engineers.

Having the right communication tools in place at every level for each member of an Agile team to effectively exchange ideas is essential to achieving the best results and developing the best product.

Counteracting “Fake Agile”

Organizations must carefully assess their Agile implementation to ensure that they are successfully adopting the methodology. A few best practices to counteract “fake Agile” include the following.

Understanding How Agile Methodology Will Help Your Organization
Prior to implementing Agile, business leaders should be trained in how Agile methodology will help their organization and learn how to implement it accordingly.

Don’t Just Fund It—See It Through
To get the most return on Agile implementation, business leaders should be involved in seeing through the implementation investment.

Enforce Effective Cross-Functional Teams
Connectivity must be supported and fostered within an organization that is adopting Agile. This involves having the right communication tools in place that effectively inform every member of an organization.

The Future Of Product Management Is Agile

Adopting Agile product development is essential to achieving product goals, especially with modern product development involving many moving pieces to oversee. Agile product management, when practiced correctly, can help organizations streamline communications, decrease lead time and master the manufacturing process to create the best possible product.

The original content of the note was published on Forbes.com. To read the full note visit here

Six Ways the Software Development Platform can Reduce Developer Burnout

The frantic pace of digitization in the industrial internet of things (IoT) creates steep learning curves for embedded software engineers. Building, integrating and updating industrial software applications without compromising safety, security and performance can feel like working under pressure on constantly shifting sands. It can be demotivating and challenging for even the most experienced professional, impacting innovation and creativity; and burnout is a very present issue estimated to affect four in five software developers.

Reduce Barriers, Reduce Burnout

Reducing barriers without compromising on the quality and complexity of projects can be achieved by choosing a software development platform that supports even the most complex embedded applications’ performance, safety and security needs. Here are six ways that the right platform contributes to reducing developer friction.

1)Never Compromise on Throughput Performance
Throughput performance is the heartbeat of software applications, so don’t compromise on the capability criteria of a preferred software development platform.
Empowering mission-critical applications to thrive in any environment requires high overall OS throughput and near-linear scalability with increased cores. Compromise only kicks the can down the road, and settling for less will mean issues with system capability, speed, and reliability from this point on.

2)Plan to Go Big (Not Go Home)
The best practice software design should always be built for growth. However, scalability can easily be hindered by the limitations of the software development platform, be it curbing expansion or compromising safety and security for progress.
Better development starts with a platform that accommodates seamless scalability as a foundation for future innovations and opportunities. Your future self will thank you for it!

3)Know When Compromise is Not Okay
Time and precision-sensitive applications, where reliability is necessary, not optional — such as surgical and production robotics — add extra pressure for software designers. Hard real-time systems built on a microkernel platform that divides core functionality across separate spaces provide a more stable environment, with absolute reliability and no scope for latency or jitter. In contrast, if you build on a monolithic microkernel, however good the software may be, if the system goes down it all goes down.

4)State-Of-The-Art Tooling
Time pressure is a major contributor to stress and burnout for software developers and teams. Removing needles from the haystack is tiresome work, and dated toolkits can mean more rework and delays. Choosing the right developer tools can accelerate time to market, identify and resolve bugs, optimize development workflows and enhance the overall integrated development environment (IDE). Therefore, take time to investigate and find state-of-the-art tooling designed to help modern developers push the boundaries of innovation.

5)Design for the Future, Today
Feeling anxious about tomorrow’s challenges? Architecting a system with the future in mind means being confident that you have a solid foundation for safety and security now, and ensuring systems remain relevant and robust in the long term.
With today’s pace of change, if you plan to adapt your software for future needs, you will already be doing it tomorrow. And the next day.

6)Skills Development is an Industry Responsibility
The best platform technology is designed to evolve and educate, helping the software developer community to keep pace with the world around it, and offering seamless support regardless of complexity.
Explore the education and support provided by your choice of software development platform provider as a gauge of its commitment to the industry. And choose to work with those that invest in progressing industry talent, research and education, as well as minimizing integration hurdles and empowering innovation, every step of the way.

Choosing the right software development platform gives a firm foundation for getting it right the first time. That means developing with the future in mind and setting up for success, reducing stress and pressure of the work.

The original content of the note was published on Devops.com. To read the full note visit here

Why And How A Minimum Viable Product Is Important For A Startup’s Future

According to a 2022 Microsoft report, 50 million startups are launched annually. This means that, on average, about 137,000 startups emerge daily—prompting a much-needed reality check.

What is an MVP?

For the uninitiated, an MVP is a basic version of the product that solves the core problem of the target audience. It is built with minimum features and demonstrates how the product will benefit customers by addressing their most important pain points. Once the MVP is built, companies collect feedback iteratively to improve the product and scale it by adding more auxiliary features that enhance the user experience.

The Lean Startup Methodology And MVP

At the core of the lean startup methodology is the concept of the MVP, encouraging incremental learning and scalable growth. By starting with a small, low-risk product iteration, businesses can gauge market interest, refine their offerings and attract early investors. Thus, an MVP enables you to get an idea of the market quickly and take the first small step as a startup with a lower financial risk.

Deploying The Perfect MVP Strategy

Certain clear expectations are required of your MVP. To do so, the MVP must contain a well-researched customer base, understand the pain points it needs to solve, align with the business objectives and remain the most simple and effective product built. The product owner or manager typically develops user stories and solves the problem.

Ensure adopted feedback aligns with immediate customer pain points.
From the user stories, identify and prioritize the features that directly address the most critical customer pain points. The aim is to keep the MVP as lean as possible, focusing on key functionalities that solve the main problems.

Balance what’s achievable versus what you want to achieve.
Keep it simple. Back in the day, one of my professors offered me some critical advice I follow to this day.

Make room for scaling.
Don't build everything today. Make plans to scale the product. Some features must definitely be left for future builds. This equally involves considering the technical infrastructure needed to support a larger user base as well as strategies for marketing, sales and customer support.

Few Of Many Types Of MVP And Feedback Models

Paper Prototyping
Paper prototyping is a simple and cost-effective method for creating prototypes of your product. You can sketch rough designs, flow charts and diagrams to visualize the product's features and functionalities with just a piece of paper and a pen.

Digital Prototyping
Digital prototyping involves using digital tools to create wireframes, mock-ups and prototypes of your product. Tools like InvisionApp, Figma and MarvelApp allow you to showcase how the product will work in real life and how the functionalities will be sorted.

Wizard Of Oz MVP
The Wizard of Oz MVP creates the illusion of a fully functional product but relies on manual execution behind the scenes. This approach allows you to test the product's concept and user experience without fully developing the technology.

Concierge MVP
Concierge MVPs provide users with a preview of the product's capabilities without building a fully automated system. Instead, representatives manually fulfill customer needs, allowing you to validate customer requirements and refine the business model.

Customer Interviews
Customer interviews are essential for getting insights into your target audience's needs, preferences and pain points. Product-oriented feedback is a major reason for conducting interviews with potential users.

In Conclusion

If your MVP passes the testing stage, congratulations—you can launch it into the market! Once you launch, keep the aforementioned feedback processes in place so that customers can give you constructive suggestions for improvement.

The original content of the note was published on Forbes.com. To read the full note visit here

Design Thinking Fosters Social Innovation

Design Thinking could be variedly conceived as a methodology, strategy, idea or a worldview, that is essentially customer-centric in its scope and applications. On a granular level, it is borrowing the “eyes of a designer”, to “see the end user”, while developing products and services, tools and equipments and designing systems and processes. Design Thinking is iterative and non-linear in its development cycle, where feedback loops involving target users interactions and engagements are guaged using prototypes, that facilitates fine-tuning and refinement of the product, service or process, prior to commercialization.

In cut-throat businessworld, such adaptive design and development cycles, not only enhance product/service market fit and faster adoption by the target segment, but also significantly improves business agility to churn out products, services and cyber-physical systems at a faster pace, commensurate with short technology obsolescence, evolving customers needs and market dynamics.

Design Thinking hinges on three interdependent variables, firstly, the desirability of the product or service, secondly, the technical feasibility of the solution and lastly its economic viability. Practitioners have added sustainability as another variable, in consonance with a global campaign for the promotion and use of ecologically and environmentally sustainable products, which could be construed as a subset of desirability. Since Design Thinking is dynamic, agile and iterative and thereby non-linear, it accomodates wild ideas, their tinkering and testing and holds immense possibility of turning ambiguity into opportunity. Design Thinking passes through different sequential phases, from the initial discovery phase to define, develop and delivery of the solution. The dicovery and define phases constitute the problem space, whereas the develop and delivery phases are the solution space. When a problem moves from the discovery phase, it allows for brainstorming of a wide variety of ideas and solutions in the define phase, covering the broad spectrum of creativity and pragmatism. Divergent thinking is the norm for creating choices before convergent thinking of making choices. American scientist and two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, averred, “To get a good idea, you need a lot of ideas.”

In a world buffeted by pernicious storms of climate change, environmental degradation, and onslaught of rapid technological advances, it is imperative that Design Thinking discipline must transition from customer-centric to human-centric to humanity-centered design paradigms. The clarion call for a circular economy is vociferous than ever before, considering the kind of environmental legacy, we intend to bequeath to our posterity. Sustainability should be at the core of every economic and non-economic activity, prioritizing the preservation of the planet, the only place humanity can call it home. Design Thinking with empathy as one of its first principles, could not only foster social innovation at scale, but also serve as a powerful enabler of social and environmental change.

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The new product-market fit: A balanced approach for sustainable growth

In startup-land, the notion of product-market fit (PMF) has been a popular concept for the last 15-20 years at least. It has served as a milestone of sorts for product success to obtain additional funding and/or demonstrate that the company may be ripe for acquisition or an IPO.

People often think of product-market fit as a switch. You either have PMF or you don’t, and VCs often try to figure out if a company has achieved PMF.

Regardless, it is important to recognize that PMF is not a discrete event, and its definition is not precise. Below, I discuss the evolving concept of PMF and how a balanced approach to growing your business and managing spend is a sensible way to manage risk while not missing out on key competitive opportunities. While this article focuses on enterprise SaaS, the advice can be applied to other product sectors as well.

HOW THE EXPERTS DEFINE PMF

“PMF is creating a compelling product that properly satisfies the target market, such that the market embraces the product,” says Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer Jeffrey Bussgang.

Marc Andreessen, an early thought leader on the topic, wrote: “Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

CHANGING VIEWS ON PMF

The reality is—and I can say this after having founded three companies—PMF is rarely ever that linear and it’s not a one-time event. More commonly, you hit upon a target market where customers resonate with your value proposition. Over time, you expand use cases for customers and continue delivering value so that customers renew and spread the word about your product and company, leading to higher adoption rates. You can then expand to additional markets where you again must establish PMF.

PRODUCT MARKET FIT FOR 2024 AND BEYOND

The notion of product market fit is still germane because it demonstrates that you have a viable product—the goal of any startup. There are many signals from the market to watch for as you improve and fine-tune your PMF:

SIGNALS FOR PMF

-Resellers are bringing you an increasing percentage of deals, indicating efficient marketplace scale. At the same time, major brands in or adjacent to your space want to work with you, whether to resell or co-market products.
-Customers want to engage with you and provide feedback on your product.
-Customers are renewing and expanding at an increasing rate.
-Your company is getting word-of-mouth referrals.
-Customer time to value or TTV (for an enterprise/B2B sale) occurs within 60 to 90 days. A strong customer success function is intrinsic to achieving PMF.
-SaaS metrics also signify PMF: A commonly held milestone is when your business crosses the $10-$15M ARR.

A BALANCED APPROACH TO PMF

Startup founders and executives sometimes follow too closely what venture capitalists, economists, and other influencers are saying about the market. Listen but don’t let it blindly direct your strategies. The hardest part of the job is knowing when to invest in the company, how much, and where.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Product-market fit is something that all startups should strive to achieve, yet PMF is part of an overarching journey toward sustainable growth. Measure sustainable growth by how much customers expand and renew, whether the cost of customer acquisition is going down, and how the channel can help your company scale faster.

The original content of the note was published on Fastcompany.com. To read the full note visit here

How To Accelerate Software Development With Generative AI

In the span of just a few years, generative AI has transformed how organizations build products, create content and resolve problems. The majority of business and technology leaders using GenAI are focusing on efficiency and cost-effectiveness gains, according to a 2024 Deloitte survey, with 91% of respondents reporting that they “expect generative AI to improve their organization’s productivity.”

It’s no replacement for human expertise and execution, but it can take the lead on mundane, repetitive tasks, allowing teams to dedicate more time and energy toward critical thinking, problem-solving and collaboration.

By using GenAI tools on my own development team, I’ve discovered that they are most valuable in two key applications.

-Code suggestion and autocompletion: AI can analyze developers' code as they work, automatically generating recommendations for code snippets or complete functions based on context and input.

-Code analysis and bug detection: Generative AI can quickly review code to detect errors or bugs early in the development process.

Strategies For Implementing AI In Software Development

To maximize the benefits of AI in software development, I recommend the following four strategies.

1-Test And Evaluate Different Tools

2-Create Better Prompts

3-Review Code Carefully

4-Protect Sensitive Data

Set realistic expectations, and use AI tools strategically and thoughtfully—in conjunction with human expertise and oversight—to deliver software solutions more efficiently than ever before.

The original content of the note was published on Forbes.com. To read the full note visit here