Starting-up a Product

Whether you are starting up your small side project, a new product in a company or your own start-up business, adopting the following principles may assist you getting started:

Move Quickly - develop something working and do it fast, embrace refactoring and flexibility.

Be Driven By The Industry - learn and understand the industry needs, share your outputs, build together with the industry and make partnerships.

Communicate - share your inputs, make others engaged with your product, pitch your story, let employees, managers, directors, sales, marketing, bizdev to understand your roadmap and business goals.

Expand Resources - knowledge, tools, libraries, automation, group cohesion, team spirit, excitement, positions, connections, reputation and everything else you can think of that can expand your team productivity.
Each principle supports the other principles. When you move quickly, it makes it possible to get feedback from the industry and better align the product to the business . When you are driven by the industry, you are making yourself relevant, you are moving in the right business path which open doors for resources and opportunities. When you get more resources, you should be able to keep moving quickly.

Those principles are somehow linked with the notion of “MVP” (Minimum Viable Product, see Lean Startup methodology), yet, I think that MVP is being overused and also it assumes that you think you know how to define “minimum” and “viable” for your product.