My Mission

Video game designers have mastered the art of creating engaging, rewarding, and addictive experiences. That’s what we all want to create in our products, right? When I look at any product, I look at it through the lens of game design. I want to share with you some key principles from game design that you can apply to your product to get your customers engaged and keep them coming back for more.

It’s common knowledge in the startup ecosystem that 90% of all startups fail. What we mean by this is that, of all the founders that begin building a product, only 10% come to a meaningful exit or acquisition. I’ve dedicated my career to helping entrepreneurs get through what I call “The Great Startup Filter” and become one of the few that make it big.

We live in a world full of distractions. Throughout our day we are constantly bombarded with notifications from email, Slack, and our phones. Our schedules are full of meetings, and our bosses and coworkers feel free to interrupt us without a second thought. How can we expect to get anything done if we can’t focus?

Continuous improvement is the very heart of agile development. It’s the culture and the mechanism that allows teams to adapt to changing circumstances. Yet it tends to be the first thing teams abandon when they get complacent in their agile development methodology. It takes work to envision an ideal and constantly strive to be better today than you were yesterday. In the fast-paced and high-pressure world of technology, it’s too easy to get so caught up in the work that we forget about the workflow.

It’s been almost 20 years since globalization created access to new labor markets around the world. In the early 2000’s, the industry for outsourced software development talent in India exploded. Since then, countries around the world have been graduating countless software engineers. The promise was that you could get high quality talent at a fraction of the price. In some cases that held true, but for many companies the short-term cost savings were lost in long delays and constant rework.

When building a company, you often have to make sacrifices. There is never enough time, money, or talent to get everything done. Sure, you’d like to build your product the right way, but you’ve got to get something built quickly so you can raise money, or get new features out the door so you can land that big client. There’s no time to plan! We have to move fast! I get it.

The core principles of the Scrum Manifesto, and why it gained such a cult following, are reflection and continuous improvement. The purpose of Scrum is to tighten the iteration cycle and hold a retrospective at the end of each cycle, in which you analyze and adapt the process to continuously improve. This tight feedback loop allows teams to gel quickly, establish an efficient process, eliminate waste, and adapt to changing priorities easily. This is what makes agile development so great.

Building a product is complicated. There are many factors that drive the decision of what to build and when. You may get a feature request from an important client. Your customer service department might be flooded with tickets about a feature that doesn’t function intuitively. Your competition might have released some shiny new features and now you have to up the ante. You may want to reach into a new vertical to position yourself for market growth or a future acquisition. You might have to overhaul your architecture to scale with demand. Your CEO might have just returned from a conference and has a brilliant idea about a new opportunity. These and other factors are constantly clamoring for your attention and resources. How do you objectively decide what to build and when?

When the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was first published, it was not a process, but a set of guiding principles. Two of the core, foundational principles of agile development are reflection and continuous improvement. By creating tight feedback loops of iteration, analyzing the meta-process of product development, and constantly experimenting in order to improve communication and efficiency, these early agile teams were able to efficiently deliver high quality software while being able to quickly adapt to the shifting priorities of the business.

It took me years of reflection to understand that all of these issues stem from a single root cause: We were treating software development like an assembly line, instead of a creative, collaborative process. My engineers were thinking about the tasks, not the product. They weren’t connected to our customers or the mission of the company. When we introduced a User-Centered Culture, where every person in the development process is engaged with and has empathy for the users, all of these major problems went away.

Your onboarding flow is, without a doubt, the most important aspect of your product. It is the user’s first interaction with your brand, at the time when they are most skeptical. It will determine whether or not your users will churn or be retained. In order to create a great conversion funnel, you must have a killer on boarding experience.

We’ve all experienced a rough development cycle, where we get bogged down by unexpected problems and scope creep. Our CEOs get frustrated when product timelines slip, and our efforts to explain the chaos does little to help. We are all familiar with agile development, but it takes discipline to keep a constant and clear communication flow throughout the development cycle. When you make a promise to your boss, how can you reliably keep that promise in the chaotic world of a startup?