Product: State vs Speed vs Acceleration
When building a (digital) product, I find that long-term success is all about speed and acceleration, not state.
If you are familiar with the lean startup methodology, you are probably also familiar with vanity metrics: number of users, historical number of downloads, etc. And you know you should not even mention them (we are all guilty).
Bringing a product to life works a little bit the same way. You could focus on finishing up that next/first version but then you are going to expose yourself to what comes next; and without planning, you will most likely endup measuring vanity metrics about the current state of your product. (This is the first step with an MVP, we need to start somewhere)
Now, agile team will know, speed and velocity are what makes your planning go from “the next version that will generate 1,000,000 downloads” to “each iteration will increase growth by 25% and retention by 10%”. You do want to measure the velocity of you team to know how fast your product will evolve and how lean you will be! (Many teams adopt agile/kanban and project management tools as well as CRM to measure speed and velocity)
And to continue the physics metaphor, it is only when you plan for acceleration that you can actively work toward a “hockey stick growth” and not leave it to chance. Acceleration in a product team is the result of all the processes and tools you are setting up to hire and bring more people to your team, to reach more markets with localizations and payment structures: you want your velocity to increase at each iteration to increase the speed at which you increase growth and retention. (Once you know your velocity, setup hiring processes, long term growth plans with expansion, integrations, etc. Startup accelerators are obviously a good place to learn how to accelerate your business too)
Nicolas Grasset is product and technology enthusiast. CTO at 