About The Office:

The Office of Silicon Valley has assembled a set of advisors designed to help start-ups with all aspects of creating and launching a successful start-up business and product. Each of the experts is a proven Silicon Valley veteran. This is the first in a series of lectures and working sessions by these hands-on industry experts.

Speaker: Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group

Date: Wednesday, August 18, 7 pm PT  (Social hour and Pizza starting at 6 pm, followed by talk at 7 pm)

Overview:

 The initial objective of any startup is straightforward: Achieve product/market fit before you run out of money.  Yet I believe that the prevalent model for how startups go about coming up with their first product is terribly inefficient, and the underlying reason why so many otherwise good ideas never make it to market.

Here’s how it typically works.  Someone with an idea gets some seed funding, and the first thing he does is hire some engineers to start building something.  The founder will have some definite ideas on what he wants, and he’ll typically act as product leader and often product designer, and the engineering team will then go from there.  The company is typically operating in “stealth mode” so there’s little customer interaction.  It takes much longer for the engineering team to build something that originally thought because the requirements and the design are being figured out on the fly.

After 3-6 months or so, the engineers have things in sort of an alpha or beta state, and that’s when they first show the product around.  Things rarely go well in this first viewing, and the team starts scrambling.  The run-rate is high because there’s now an engineering team building this thing as fast as they can, so the money is running out, and the product isn’t there.  Maybe the company gets more funding and a chance to get the product right, but often they don’t.  

Yet the best teams take a very different approach.  This talk will share industry best practices for rapidly discovering an effective product and market.  We will also discuss the most common mistakes that startups typically make, and how to avoid them.

Target Audience:

This talk is for very early stage startups.  Entrepreneurs, designers, engineers or product leaders are all welcome.

About the Speaker:

Marty Cagan is the founder of The Silicon Valley Product Group.  He is a Silicon Valley-based product executive with more than 20 years of experience with industry leaders including eBay, America Online, Netscape Communications and Hewlett-Packard.   Before founding SVPG to pursue his interests in helping others create successful products through his writing, speaking, consulting and training, Marty was most recently Senior Vice-President of Product Management and Design for eBay, where he was responsible for creating and building the product and design organization and defining the products and services for the company’s global e-commerce trading site.

Marty is the author of the book “Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love” and he helps technology companies around the world with their product strategy and the capabilities of their product organization.  You can see more about SVPG and Marty Cagan at www.svpg.com.