Insights

Our perspectives, learnings, and insights on traction, venture capital, and product management.

Category: Product Management

The Value of a Startup’s Vision Statement

Why a Vision Statement is the most important line of code a startup will ever write. Traditional Vision Statements are Exciting for the Company A traditional vision statement is aspirational for a company; it describes where the company is going if it’s successful. It can also be limiting when viewed through the lens of a venture capitalist.…

Time Travel to Save your Startup

Dramatically improve the odds of your venture’s success by rooting out and mitigating knowable risks with a premortem. In startup culture, optimism tends to flourish at the expense of honest pessimism. At Foundational, we embrace this by starting our strategy engagements collaborating with our clients to agree on how the world must be changing, what…

Trust — The Missing Feature Your Customers Demand

The greatest, and often unforeseen, challenge healthcare technology startups must resolve is establishing trust with their end-users. While all startups face various challenges related to trust, the healthcare space most clearly illustrates the need to interweave it throughout a product’s value propositions and user experiences. We’ve seen the impact of fine-tuning these two specific areas…

Closing the Product Management Gap

How to eliminate the #1 killer of startups I recently wrote about the Product Management Gap: the period of time between having a successful demonstration of a technical innovation (the proof-of-concept) and when a full-time team member is assigned to focus on managing the product(s) that feature it. The Product Management Gap is a pervasive and deadly…

The Product Management Gap

The #1 cause of death for startups is a self-inflicted wound The Product Management Gap is the period of time between having a successful demonstration of a technical innovation (the proof-of-concept) and when a full-time team member is assigned to focus on managing the product(s) that feature it. Early-stage funded startups commonly have employees focused on…

startup matriculation rates

Why It’s So Difficult to Disrupt

How rising VC expectations are causing founders to ignore user experiences in favor of unsustainable growth. The trouble with innovation… Through my experience as a repeat technical startup founder, I’ve found the greatest difficulty in developing a new technology is not getting something to function. It’s discovering that a user’s tolerance for learning a new…