Pilot objective Within the Scrum community, there is abundant writing suggesting that the two main factors of Scrum implementation failure are: (1) sub-optimal team structure at the onset, and (2) the Scrum Team failing to reach critical formation maturity early … Read More
Classic Scrum’s Achilles’ heel One of the weak areas of classic Scrum, in my opinion, is the relative simplicity of the ideation phase. “What to build” is sometimes an arbitrary discussion during the Scrum Backlog building and Sprint Planning exercises, … Read More
Lean: not just a hype word for efficiency Yah sure, we do “lean” here and we operate a tight ship with just a few of us doing everything – you know, everyone is multi-taskin’. “Lean” is such a convenient term, … Read More
Glossary: Lean, Agile, Scrum, Sprint, Kanban Consider Lean & Agile as pretty much the same thing, they are basically really good approaches to handling projects with a lot of uncertainties, which is why successful startups take this approach. (For a … Read More
(This post is an excerpt from our earlier article A Pretty Good Summary of Lean, Agile, Scrum.) ‣ The Spiritless Scrum: Sprints as Mini-Waterfalls Often, User Stories become mini specification documents. With that, coding or whatever activity gets executed, and … Read More
Sharing your Vision Leaders, why is it all so often that when you “share” your vision to your people, you don’t really feel it’s shared? They listen to you and agree, but you can almost tell they are taking it … Read More
Sound familiar? Let’s talk about product market fit. Your angel investor invested in your idea. Your VC and series A investors gave you money to make the product and bring it to market. You bootstrapped yourself and made a lot … Read More
Four Areas of Focus We focus on the following four areas to help startups build strong foundations for marketing and enterprise success: Make marketing more approachable and easier to grasp Embrace third party specialist marketing resources and platforms Nurture marketing … Read More
My name is Takeshi. I am the founder of Lifecycle. We help startups succeed with better marketing. After a long banking career, I started my startup marketing life in 2011, first involved in a portfolio of Maker Movement type of … Read More
The Lean Startup, Eric Ries, 2011 Scrum, Jeff Sutherland, 2014 The Startup Owner’s Manual, Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, 2012 Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore, 2014 (3rd edition) All of these books are wisdom from our great forerunners. They … Read More