| @jchrisa: Sometimes the HN comment timeout doesn't make sense. Hah! This is my reply. "When you have traction, you'll know it. Traction is what allows you to learn. Then you might wanna try not failing, or at least, let features fail fast, but keep the overall ball rolling. Real traction isn't something you can buy, so if you find it, stick to it and grow it." This is true, but if step #1 is "getting traction" then there's a learning loop there, too. I'm not sure if what you're proposing is a process that looks like "try lots of things until you get traction and then worry about focused iterations." If you are then I think when that approach works it works by accident. It's true you'll have a hard time coming by lots of quantitative data before you get traction, but that's only the strictest kind of learning. On the other hand, if each failure results in a complete product/market reboot, that's not learning -- that's guessing. :) It sounds like this is what the OP's company was doing, though. If your product didn't get traction, why not? What will you do differently next time? Will our product work, but not for the customers we thought it would work for? Is our first market too big, too small, too ill-defined? How will we know when we're succeeding or not, pre-traction? etc. etc. |