Massacre at IBM

steveblank.com

29 points·raheemm··7 comments

Find and Fix Bad News. Bad news early is good news, if you find and fix it early.

This is my immediate takeaway from this article. I am just learning to not be shy about showing people my projects early, to start the validation process as soon as possible. I have been surprised to see that people not liking some of my ideas actually feels good, because it frees me to either improve the ideas, work on something else, or push hard and try to show that my idea does have merit.

tl;dr: if you ignore your customers, pretty soon they will ignore you.

(Almost all of their customers said that they needed a particular feature. Not having it was costing them production time. The few customers who didn't explicitly say they needed it were considered evidence that nobody really needed it. Selective deafness.)

That was a really horrible way to give a story a linkbait headline, intentionally or otherwise. Flagged.

A former IBMer.

envelopE. the word is envelope. please. "envelop" is a verb and completely throws the reader. twice.

I'm currently reading The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing by Nagle et al. And something similar is jumping out at me -- in terms of going deep into the customer's world and finding out how your product adds value.

Talking. The best thing since pointy sticks.

What an amazingly tasteless headline.

bad headline.

bad spell checking.

shameless self-promotion.

gathering requirements during dinner and compressing the schedule from 18 months to 9. I'm sure it was great to work in engineering there and keep those managers honest.

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