There are a number of canvas created by others that focus on product development, as shown in Table 4-1. Table 4-1. Visual ideation canvases Name Purpose The Lean Canvasa Makes the assumption that product/market fit is the riskiest hypothesis that must be tested. The Opportunity Canvasb Focuses discussions about what we’re building and why, then

Remember, metrics are meant to hurt — not to make us feel like we are winning. They must be actionable and trigger a change in our behavior or understanding.

You build it, you run it. Teams that build new products and services must take responsibility for the operation and support of those services, at least until they are stable and the operation and support burden becomes predictable. By doing this, we also ensure that it is easy to measure the cost of running the service and the value it delivers.

One Metric That Matters (OMTM). OMTM is a single metric that we prioritize as the most important to drive decisions depending on the stage of our product lifecycle and our business model. It is not a single measure that we will use throughout our product lifetime: it will change over time depending on the problem area we wish to address. We focus

By keeping our initial customer base small — not chasing vanity numbers to get too big too fast — we force ourselves to keep it simple and maintain close contact with our customers every step of the way. This allows teams more time with customers to listen, build trust, and ensure early adopters that we’re ready to help. Remember, reaching big

Based on experiments at Microsoft, 1/3 of ideas created a statistically significant positive change, 1/3 produced no statistically significant difference, and 1/3 created a statistically significant negative change.12 All of the ideas tested were thought to be good ones — but neither intuition nor expert opinion are good gauges of the value our

The Business Model Canvas, shown in Figure 4-3, was created by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur along with 470 co-creators as a simple, visual business model design generator. It is a strategic management and entrepreneurial tool that enables teams to describe, design, challenge, invent, and pivot business models. Instead of writing a business

The Kanban Method follows four principles of continuous improvement designed to minimize resistance to change: Start with what you do now Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change Initially, respect current roles, responsibilities, and job titles Encourage acts of leadership at all levels

Given that break-ins into corporate networks are now routine (and sometimes state-sponsored), the idea that data is somehow safer behind the corporate firewall is absurd. The only way to effectively secure data is strong encryption combined with rigorous hygiene around key management and access controls. This can be done as effectively in the cloud