A good strategy gives yourself and your team focus. It maps out a clear path towards achieving your vision of what you want your product to become. Your vision defines where you’re going — your strategy tells you and your team how to get there.
With all the things you could be doing, with resources and time continually running out, a strategy helps you to decide what to do and — more importantly — what not to do.
In order to make these tradeoffs, your strategy should answer the fundamental questions:
- What problem are we solving?
- Who are we solving it for? …
Best practices and future trends in B2B selling from Slack, Salesforce, Google, SAP, Apttus, and Microsoft.
Our app, Ruum takes over the project management for account executives with complex sales motions.
So naturally, we used our latest San Francisco trip as an opportunity to connect with some of the Valley’s brightest minds in sales. Here is what we learned…
Growth mindset
When the topic fell on hiring and putting together sales teams we were told to look out for the growth mindset. What are the key characteristics of someone with a growth mindset and how do you identify it?
I learned early on, that in sales the harder you work, the more money you earn. And the more you make people enjoy themselves and feel human, the more you’ll enjoy your job. …
A bit over six months ago we got seed funding for RUUM 🚀. My co-founder Florian Frey and I felt on top of our game. We had a fancy looking MVP; we had an excellent lineup of beta customers and even a few letters of intent from well-known brands.
However, the reality was that we were all over the map with our product. We had traction in the supply chain market, but also in HR, and we were getting promising leads from inside sales too. …
Next to 2016’s most notable trends: Bots, NLP, AI, and conversational commerce. Here are some product lessons that didn’t get as much fanfare as they might deserve. And of course, we want to apply them on RUUM 🚀.
Seamless device hand-over: Spotify Connect, OS X Handoff, and Universal Clipboard
Connect — Spotify’s multi-device mechanism — launched in 2013. But it’s only this past year that I learned to love this feature in comparison to other hand-over mechanisms.
I start a song on my Mac and leave the room. The simplicity with which I can then take control over the audio with my phone is a genius experience.
It’s only in 2016 that Apple moved into this space with the release of Handoff and Universal Clipboard. With all the wearables, voice controlled home speakers, smart fridges, and other IoT-enabled devices we already have this is a huge deal to get right. It’s also an excellent way to make your product or platform more sticky. …
Inside Google’s Launchpad, the ultimate pre-incubator startup week
A few weeks back I was one of the lucky few to participate in Google’s Launchpad program. Held at Google’s London Campus, it’s a pre-incubator program for startups.
True to Google’s mantra: “Fail early, to succeed sooner,” the goal is to experience all steps of a typical startup’s first few months within super compressed 5 days.
Since 90% of all startups fail within the first 6 months, the motivation behind this program is to compress the learning from these 6 months into just one week.
What follows is a 5 day plan on starting your own business. It’s based on my experience of Google launchpad and spiced up a bit with my own learnings from being in the startup world in past two years. …
After four days of non-stop web performance (first at @velocityconf then at @WebPerfDays) here is a list of my main takeaways in three parts.
Layout trashing is your bottleneck
As Google’s @aerotwist put it: Today it’s most likely layout trashing and image re-sizing which are preventing your web app from hitting a smooth 60 frames per second.
- Prevent layout trashing and document re-flows by separating and batching your reads from your writes to the DOM (checkout the FastDOM library: https://github.com/wilsonpage/fastdom)
- If you absolutely must do calculations on the ‘scroll’ event, do them in a call to requestAnimationFrame to give the browser a chance to perform the scroll fluidly.
- For better, jank free scrolling: deactivate any hover effects on scrolling
- Use the devTools’s timeline, profile, and audit panel to figure out where your bottlenecks are and what your memory is up to.
You can also use console.time, console.timeEnd, as well as console.profile to trigger the analysis directly in your code: https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/console-api …
Twitter’s front-end framework from the ground up
I noticed that flight.js was missing the typical no frills ‘Hello World’ example, so here goes my stab at one.
In this hello world we will use flight.js' standalone version to create a basic component, which attaches to the DOM and writes out an h1 heading on user click. You can find the source code on Github.
Starting a new project
To install Flight.js you can either use the standalone flight.js file, or get Flight.js through Twitter’s bower front-end package manager.
The later is closer to the way Flight's developers do it in their example app (using RequireJS), but it requires a few more steps, so I decided to go with the standalone for this simple ‘Hello World’ (I’ve put together a separate post on using Flight together with bower, RequireJS and Yeoman). …
