Elliot Smith

Dinner Party Software

I can’t remember where or when but I once was told an anecdote about economics and human perception that stuck with me. This is paraphrased somewhat so lets hope the original author forgives me. The story goes like this: It’s fairly well known that if you’re lucky

Is retention is the only real measure of product market fit?

Your business will live or die based on whether or not you manage to find, and maintain, product market fit (PMF). Product market fit is notoriously hard to measure, especially with leading metrics. In the long run there's only one metric that manages to capture concisely if you’

Drafters, Editors and Critics

I’ve noticed that, generally speaking, people have one of three modes when it comes to working on ideas. These ideas could be anything but for the sake of clarity, assume I’m talking about some new initiative within a business. The three modes are Drafter, Editor and Critic. Finding

My very-much-overkill video call setup

I often get comments on my very much overkill home webcam setup. It stems back to a time where I was experimenting with making YouTube videos and podcasts. Despite not doing much of that any more I’ve kept the setup at my desk for days when I work from

The Accuracy of the Incumbent

Both the company I started, and the one I work for now have been trying to disrupt. That is to say, there’s an incumbent process or system that exists and we’re trying to do better. In both cases doing better means higher accuracy and delivering answers earlier. First

Cautions on being 'experiment driven'

I hear a lot of people say they want their startup to be more ‘experiment driven’. I’ve encouraged that behaviour a lot myself. Take bets, see how they progress, gather data and use the result to validate, or invalidate some sort of hypothesis. If executed well, this approach can

Compressed Complexity

There is a lot of advice out there stating that every product should be as simple as possible. Less clicks, less decisions. There’s even a prominent story about having too many jams to choose from and the overwhelming sadness that can cause. Like most high level advice, this idea

startups

You can’t delete the default

Every company has a default. It’s the set of things that happen when nobody is pushing in any particular direction. Usually, its the combined momentum of all the pushing you’ve been doing. There are times in a company where its useful to remove that default. You want to

If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric.

Word of mouth is a hell of a growth lever, but only when it works. It’s now become almost universal to send your customers an NPS survey and—hopefully—use your scores in the high 80s to show how well you’ll grow organically. Truth is, this only works

AI

Red Bubble, Green Bubble

This post was inspired by, but isn’t solely about, the recent market panic set off by the release of DeepSeek. I don’t claim to be able to pick which new technology fads will be winners. Sometimes bubbles deflate a little but ultimately stick around. These I’ll call

Second Principles

Knowing how to do something from first principles is a valuable skill. However, always starting from first principles is a good way to relearn many mistakes. I am the kind of person who likes to really understand things. I love a good spreadsheet or back of the envelope model. I

startups

Barnacle processes

Barnacle processes, invented when growth is lacking, can slow and kill otherwise great startups. Tech startups have a general culture of going fast. When growth is slow in a culture like that, people often still want to move around quickly. When that happens, people need to run in circles to

startups

Manage risks, not methods.

The hardest part of transitioning into management is becoming comfortable with people doing things differently from you. Your job shifts from what you can output to how much output you can generate in others. Many first-time managers make the mistake of thinking their job is to ensure their reports do

Maxwell Plus - Lessons Learned

(This post also appeared over on the MSV blog.) It is easy to announce a new investment in a new company when all we need to talk about is the potential of an opportunity. But we don’t speak enough about the companies that don’t make it.  Maxwell Plus

product

Thoughts on service and tech startups

Some definitions. The rest of this post will only make sense if we’re on the same page about what a technology and service business is. The scenarios I am describing combine human-delivered specialty service and a technology platform enabling that service delivery. In the long term, these companies tend

product

Let your users start over

I wish that more products had an option to reset to factory settings. Whether I haven’t used a product in a long time or have found a new way to set things up, there are plenty of reasons to return to square one. In a world where more and

The Signal and the Noise Review

Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise successfully walks the fine line of communicating a complex set of ideas in enough detail to be both interesting and informative. The book introduces the reader to statistical modelling through examples in sports, politics, finance, and science. It makes no attempt to

startups

Lessons from one too many model spreadsheets

Few things can be as helpful and potentially time-wasting as modelling your business with a spreadsheet and setting metrics. A clear model of how you make money is a great tool to help identify bottlenecks or risks. On the other hand, it is very easy for models and the team

startups

Know which type of goals you're chasing

It’s important that you know what kind of company you are working for. In particular, if your company has reached the stage where things are steady and predictable or if they remain mostly unknown. Some companies, especially bigger ones, tend to move in a fixed direction. Goals and projects

product

Talk to your users

Once, a long time ago, I was at an event where a local 'business leader' came to talk. Their talk was the story of their business, how they grew it and what made it successful. By some metrics their business was a success. It wasn't a

Notes from the four Silicon Valley Product Group Books

Over the last three months I read all four of the currently published SVPG books They cover a large range of topics in what they call ‘the product operating model’. This model spans high level product strategy, day to day product discovery and fields like product marketing. I recently collated

product

Avoiding antipatterns in product discovery

Product discovery works best when you have no favourite ideas. Spending time with real users validating problems and potential solutions is a critical part of good product discovery. Often ideas that sound great around the office white board fall flat when tested with real users. An important part of maturing

books

Book Review: INSPIRED by Marty Cagan of SVPG

I have found myself on somewhat of a SVPG book binge recently. A binge kicked off from an episode of Lenny’s podcast with Marty Cagan on what he calls ‘Product Management Theater’. Product management theater is the idea that many product teams end up doing things that sound like

The Minimum Marketable Difference

There are lots of reasons that startups don’t make it. Sometimes they build the wrong thing. Sometimes they build the right thing too early. Sometimes, amongst all the others, they build something great but can’t convince the world to use it. That’s what this post is about.

product

My path to working in Product

There was never a moment where I felt that destiny was pulling me towards a career in product. Though I have come to realize that those moments tend to live mostly in fiction. Despite all that, I currently find myself as Head of Product in a growing technology startup. I