nielr1

I'm pretty sure princess bride quotes get the win always. If you read the subarticle mentioned on HuffPo the author there makes a pretty interesting argument.

These days "Always be learning" and "Always be googling" seem to be the same thing :)

Clearly many businesses have bifurcated price points. I totally agree this can work. The question is when? If you walk into Target you can buy a pack of gum and a $1000 garden set. My point was in the context of most startups (tech primarily) its usually a bad sign in your business when very early on you see bifurcation in pricing. I've been involved in many businesses that have seen that and the ones that convinced themselves they could serve both types of customers learned the hard way that you only get to do that when you've got a solid foundation in your business of one type or another.

The reason that i didn't touch on any of these things is that the necessary skills for them all (that you mention and many more) are relative to a point in time and very much related to the charts i talked about. Let's use an example: what's "the right" organizational structure. By definition it changes as a company grows. An organization will need to be structured differently at 3 people, 12 people, 30 people, 65 people, etc.. This is, in fact, a demonstration of understanding the S-curve and how it applies all over a business. Something parochial like accounting is actually the same thing. The complexity of our accounting (and need for systems, experts, auditing, etc..) was directly related to us hitting a network effect in our business. As they say - you can run accounting of a bad business really well.

I'm not disagreeing with you just noting that my piece was much more about how to recognize patterns that emerge in a business everywhere and know which pattern you're working with to make tactical and strategic decisions at the right time.

I've written quite a bit about financials, the economics of startups, etc.. Here is a good example about business model integrity on my blog:

http://parallax.blogs.com/parallax_calculating_tech/2006/05/...

I constantly read tons of business books. Some are pretty cheesy, some have lots of good insights buried in them. Good reads:

Emotional Intelligence (http://amzn.to/9LXV1x) The House Advantage (http://amzn.to/95VsAv) - full disclosure this is my friends book and Trada is mentioned in it but its a great look at using stats in business Statistics (http://amzn.to/bUZTcW) - oddly a great read

And ps - you can Google me to find out my resume. I have only ever built startups - from powerpoint to sale. Since the first company i started when i was 14 :)

Folks - i'm the one that gave that presentation. One thing I am seeing here is a semantic assumption that PRODUCT management and PROJECT management are the same thing. IMHO they are two vastly different disciplines and very little of what I said applies to my opinion of PROJECT management (I could do another preso on that alone). Project management is a book keeper and arbitrator function in my view - not a decision maker about the final product being developed. Many companies blend these functions, we intentionally separated them as managing project timelines and gant charts is a vastly different skill set than managing requirements. I suspect many people have a poor opinion of Project Management (and the institute) because they blend the two functions. But don't confuse the downfalls of many project managers (they have limited consituencies - budget and timeline) with the Product Management process.

Hope that helps - glad this started some discussion.

Niel