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Jeremy Reimer

Posts: 9350

Posted on: 2013-01-08 17:45:59.000

I’m reading Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup and I’m surprised how many good lessons there are inside, not just for entrepreneurs, but for basically every company.

Take this quote:

[quote]

A few years ago, a team that sells products to large media companies invited me to help them as a consultant because they were concerned that their engineers were not working hard enough. However, the fault was not in the engineers, it was in process the whole company was using to make decisions. They had customers but did not know them very well. They were deluged by feature requests from customers, the internal sales team, and the business leadership. Every new insight became an emergency that had to be addressed immediately. As a result, long-term projects were hampered by constant interruptions. Even worse, the team had no clear sense of whether any of the changes they were making mattered to customers. Despite the constant tuning and tweaking, the business results were consistently mediocre.

[/quote]

<p class='p2'>Does that sound like your company? It sounds exactly like my former company! That’s basically all we did for the five years I was there. Management always blamed the engineers and kept meddling and changing procedures, seemingly at random, when the problems lay elsewhere.

Definitely something to think about.