I’m on the board of advisors of a number of startups including Signpost, Miso Media, and Slated. My background is I used to work for amazon.com and Google as a Product Manager and Product Marketing Manager. As an advisor, I’m typically most focused on product-related issues. However, like most advisors, my role can be quite broad and I’ve worked on everything from general strategy to helping devise a sales compensation structure to even more nitty gritty issues like determining holiday bonuses. My role is to provide value to the CEO / founders so I’m happy to help on any issue they want to raise. The typical interactions are 80% around issues they want to talk about and 20% around issues that I see and would like to raise.
I’m also friendly with 10+ additional startups—everyone from undergrads in college to graduates of incubators to repeat entrepreneurs. If you have a startup (or are thinking of starting one) and think I might be able to share some useful thoughts, please feel free to reach out.
Someone told me something a few months ago and my first thought when I read it was, "That's a crazy way to do business." My instincts told me one thing -- and after the situation developed a little more, my instincts proved me correct. The caveat I should throw in in all this, is that within this...
Following my blog post, "Product: Quality Improvements vs. New Features" [link], a friend and former Google colleague of mine wrote in the following:
[
Nelson, thanks for writing this post. As a PM, I've often struggled with quality improvements vs. new features. Using a notion of value is...
A startup I work with is in private alpha of their product. As we were hitting the site, coming up with different ideas, etc. -- the board chair asked me a simple question, "How do you prioritize quality improvements versus new features?"
I want to open this post on Steve Jobs. Walter Isaacson...
