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I have a confession to make! I am kind of a jerk. I make people feel uncomfortable. Not all the time and not all the people. I do it mostly to Product Owners or the equivalent titles depending on the methodology they follow.

Why I do it, you might ask? It’s good for them and me. How I do it, you might ask? Very simple, I ask them what is the next most important thing to work on and why. Try it yourself. It works miracles. 9 out of 10 times you will hear mumbling or something like “I feel it that way”. Not very scientific and not very convincing.

I’ll pay for my sins tough, by telling you how to help yourselves, your PO and your team out, by finding the right answer – the scientific way.

The case

So here is a simple backlog for you:

Classic ...

About time we had a little word on siloed organizations—many departments and sometimes even frontiers! Does this look familiar?

Nodding head? Ok!

What does this look like to your customers?

They don’t see silos—they see content!

How can we tear down these silos?

It starts with perspective — different teams have a different idea on the role of content. Let’s look at a typical marketing team — lots of people with a tendency to wear black. And then there is the guy who runs the show and is responsible for content marketing.

This role did not exist 5 years ago because something has radically changed. As Lori from Forrester said: “74% of business buyers told Forrester they conduct more than half of their research online before making an offline...

Ten years ago, Andy Dunn was at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. He was torn between taking a high paying job and following the lead of Brian Spaly– a classmate who was selling better-fitting pants out of the back of his car.

That company would become Bonobos, a promising survivor in an otherwise graveyard of so-called “ecommerce 2.0” upstarts.

Spaly and Dunn had a contentious falling out; with Dunn keeping Bonobos and Spaly going on to build (and sell) TrunkClub. Dunn is still plugging away with Bonobos, hoping to reinvent the way brands are built in an online world.

He says he’s now confident that Bonobos will survive. But continuing to build it into a stand-alone ecommerce company is another matter. An even bigger challenge...

Do you have a million-dollar business idea in your mind and don’t know HOW to proceed? Whether it is worth, investing time, money and effort?

This is the question that haunts many entrepreneurs and stops them from working on their business idea. The reason behind this is lack of insightful data available online to guide one through the steps. That’s where my motivation comes from when writing this article.

Hopefully, by the end, you’ll understand WHAT to do, HOW to do, WHEN to do and WHY to do things if you have a great new business idea.

Stop being a wantrepreneur. Think of a new business idea, do a set of exercises or validations before taking a decision on whether to move forward with the business idea or not and make a business ...

Every founder knows that company culture is crucial to a startup’s success — as Fred Wilson says, “If you want to be in business forever, you need to build a culture that sustains the business” — but there are seven common mistakes that startups make when creating their culture:

1. You think culture just “happens.”

Running a startup means your burn rate is always in the forefront of your mind, and as a result, everything takes a backseat to getting to MVP. Culture can be fixed later, right? The truth is that “culture” is just another way of saying “how we work here,” and by the time you get to your MVP, it will be deeply entrenched.

FiveStars’s founder Victor Ho never took the time to officially define the culture— he felt it was too “chee...

Creativity and innovation thrive in an early-stage startup environment. Communication is harmonious, decisions are made quickly as a team, and shared understanding trumps systems and processes as everyone shares the workload.

When I launched BounceFire, my first startup, I was juggling many tasks: selling our services, writing code, hiring employees, and drywalling the new office, not to mention cleaning the toilet. We did everything manually. It was only when we hired our first employee that I could start offloading certain tasks.

But as the company grew, it encountered a common problem for startups: How do you keep hold of that easy communication, creativity, and innovation as you scale?

The Challenge of Innovation
for startup businesses...

Whether you’re a freelancer or small business owner, invoicing is essential. After all, if you aren’t getting paid, how can you expect to keep your business afloat or keep up with your bills? However, if you’re new to invoicing, you may feel a bit overwhelmed because there’s a lot more to it than just sending out an email that says “You Owe Me $1,000.”

To help you better understand the invoicing process, here are some useful tips you should implement the next time you send out an invoice.

Invoicing Basics

Before sending out an invoice, you’ll want to make sure you have the following key elements covered:

• Date – When are you sending out the invoice and when do you expect it to be paid? It’s not uncommon for clients to pay an invoice 3...

It is critically important for the founders of a company to intimately understand the company’s Key Performance Indicators (“KPIs”). Founders cannot hope to grow a company in any meaningful way without an almost obsessive focus on its KPIs. Why? Because KPIs, if constructed correctly, give management and potential investors a cold, analytical snapshot of the state of the company, untainted by emotion or rhetoric. This focus must not be limited to the KPIs themselves, for they are merely measurements of outcomes. We look for founders to have an understanding of what levers can be pulled and what tweaks can be made to improve the business, which will then be reflected in its KPIs. So the focus should not be on the KPIs themselves, but the mea...

If you’re looking to improve your sales process — look no further than the “2017 B2B Buyer’s Survey Report“. Buyers want things to be easy. So easy, in fact, that 89 percent of survey respondents said that they chose vendors that made a return on investment easier to prove or that could be easily justified with a business case. They also preferred speed over price — with 80 percent of buyers citing deployment and ease of use as “very important.”

Your customers want to understand how to use your product — not sit through a pitch and wonder if it’ll actually fit their needs. Selling is less about explaining why buyers should buy and more about showing how an easy-to-use product or service will help them.

Ditch the dead...

Pitching your product line to a retailer? There are so many areas to cover. Do you know which three facts matter most to the decision-makers?

The greatest challenge product companies face is convincing retail buyers your brand will sell. If you want shelf placement in Target, Walmart, CVS, or ANY retailer for that matter, your retail pitch (or as I call it, the Retail Story) needs to address retailers’ key needs. And their primary need revolves around mitigating their sales risk.

The following are the 3 most effective ways to show retailers how you will mitigate their sales risk as you’re pitching your product to retailers and stores:

#1: Demonstrate Sales Potential

The best way of showing how you will mitigate sales risk is by showi...