During the first three phases, before the product enters the market, all team members call themselves developers and do everything, including tasks and problems that may even lie outside their competence. However, at the company building stage, this model ceases to be useful. Here, calm, measured work with clear responsibility and maximum efficiency is required, which can only be ensured by limited specialization. Therefore:
It is necessary to create departments in these areas.
It is essential to specify the areas of responsibility of each structural division.
Within these areas, the missions of each team need to be defined more narrowly.
And it is imperative to introduce a culture of quick response (without “dumping problems on paper”).
Make sure the mom database organizational structure works effectively
Unfortunately, it is impossible to do without bureaucracy. But excessive red tape also harms the production process. The general task of managers at all management levels is to make sure that subordinate employees are ready to make decisions without additional instructions from above. It is necessary to spread the decentralized approach and implement a horizontal management model (this is when any manager directly reports to more than 7 lower-level specialists). And then select competent employees who meet all the criteria for the positions. This is the only way to achieve the effectiveness of the management process.
It is also necessary to take care of introducing the practice of customer-oriented behavior. Experience shows that those companies that put the user first, creating the appropriate infrastructure for this, are 60% more profitable than those who do not. Excellent examples of such practice are Zappos and Amazon. If you estimate how many man-hours these companies spend to deal with the problems of their users within the framework of their functionality, then the count will go into the millions per year!
3 Useful Books on CustDev
Customer development is a unique technology that allows a startup company to bring a new or improved product to market without threatening its financial health. At the same time, developers will be confident at any given moment in time about what sales results await them (admittedly, this is already a lot).
If you want to learn more about the principles of CustDev, it makes sense to read the following literature.
Rob Fitzpatrick, "Ask Mom: How to Talk to Clients and Validate Your Business Idea When Everyone Else Is Lying" (for tips on how to ask questions).
Rob Fitzpatrick, "Ask Mom"
Steve Blank, "The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Strategies for Creating Successful Startups."
Alexander Osterwalder, "Developing Value Propositions."
CustDev helps to identify the true needs of customers at the stage when millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours have not been spent on the production and promotion of a new product. Moreover, such an analysis can be carried out for any product (that is, not necessarily for the first time introduced to the market, but in this case the effectiveness of CustDev is especially clear), as well as at any stage of its life cycle. In fact, the competent application of the CustDev methodology is the key to building a successful business!