Lindsey DeFalco

VP of Product, Crossbeam

Content

Under what circumstances is it worthwhile to pursue a 0-1 product that can be easily duplicated by a large competitor?

Lindsey DeFalco

Crossbeam VP of Product • November 15

The two biggest things to ask are: "would they?" and "could they?". This is both a question of strategy and tactics - of both you, and the competitor. My first startup was a directly competitive product with multiple established players in the space, so this was a topic from day one. My second st......Read More

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How do you know if you have validated the problem space enough to start dedicating engineering resources to building out the product?

Lindsey DeFalco

Crossbeam VP of Product • November 15

This is heavily dependent on the type of product you are building, but you can get very far with high fidelity designs and manually "hacking" things together. I worked at a company where we "generated" (hand created) an analytics report for a customer (who was actually paying us) once a month. It......Read More

506 Views

How do you go about brainstorming the right solutions in terms of coming up with user experience to address the validated problems to be solved for users

Lindsey DeFalco

Crossbeam VP of Product • November 15

Ah, brainstorming: it sounds so simple, but it can be so hard to do well. I've tried many different approaches over the years, and have found different ones successful depending on the company size, co-location of folks, etc. I'll go over my favorites, but first I want to touch on a few important......Read More

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I subscribe to the Ried Hoffman quote - “If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late.” How do you actually live this out in a larger company where there is internal anxiety?

Lindsey DeFalco

Crossbeam VP of Product • November 15

#1: Trust. You have to earn it. It's all fun and games when there is "nothing to lose" and you're a small scrappy startup. But once you have paying customers, usage targets to hit, churn numbers to report on, and revenue numbers to hit, it starts to feel harder to launch. I've been through this t......Read More