Not sure if anyone else has told you this, but I find it interesting that you're revisiting your postmortem, Ben. It's almost like a postmortem of the postmortem.
Lessons learned are valid in their context, and as you've grown you gained more depth, it has given you a different perspective. You can now reveal more layers of the onion. Your posts have me thinking about my own experience.
Back at FranchiseBlast, we explored a good number of pivots/ideas but shot most of them down because whatever we would build wouldn't fundamentally change our commercialization strategy. Without cracking the commercialization nut, none of the ideas would have gotten anywhere.
The pivot that did work was because we shifted who we were selling to and found a persona that resonated with our approach. The new solution was 1% of the scale/complexity of the previous software, but wasn't a completely reset as we just used it as a go-to-market wedge.
When I reflect on my past, the first thing that comes to mind is how I got lucky to find every individual on the team, how they joined because they had a certain skill set but the areas where they brought the best contribution to the company in the long run was a happy little accident. A few years after joining, they weren't the same people they were when they were hired. I didn't notice you talking about the team as much in here; have you observed the same thing?
Not sure if anyone else has told you this, but I find it interesting that you're revisiting your postmortem, Ben. It's almost like a postmortem of the postmortem.
Lessons learned are valid in their context, and as you've grown you gained more depth, it has given you a different perspective. You can now reveal more layers of the onion. Your posts have me thinking about my own experience.
Back at FranchiseBlast, we explored a good number of pivots/ideas but shot most of them down because whatever we would build wouldn't fundamentally change our commercialization strategy. Without cracking the commercialization nut, none of the ideas would have gotten anywhere.
The pivot that did work was because we shifted who we were selling to and found a persona that resonated with our approach. The new solution was 1% of the scale/complexity of the previous software, but wasn't a completely reset as we just used it as a go-to-market wedge.
When I reflect on my past, the first thing that comes to mind is how I got lucky to find every individual on the team, how they joined because they had a certain skill set but the areas where they brought the best contribution to the company in the long run was a happy little accident. A few years after joining, they weren't the same people they were when they were hired. I didn't notice you talking about the team as much in here; have you observed the same thing?