Lean Startups and Co-Evolution
Yesterday I attended Eric Ries' talk on Lean Startups. For those of you who read his blog, there wasn't any new material, although certain concepts like Five Whys made a stronger impact when hearing Eric explain it himself.
One of the topics he covered was how Lean Startups should organize themselves into two cross-functional teams: Customer Development (which includes engineering), whose role is to figure out the problem customers have, and Product Development (which includes marketing), whose role is to create a solution to that problem. In many cases for startups in new markets, both the problem and solution are not known; you have some vision for a product ("It'd be awesome if only…"), but you don't really know what the customer problem exactly is, nor do you know what the solution exactly is.
(Problem and solution are both unknown, via)
The Lean Startup solution is to create feedback loops internally within teams and externally between teams. The Customer Development team does some thinking, testing, and talking with customers, and comes up with a hypothesis of what the problem is. Then the Product Development team does thinking, testing, and prototyping to come up with a rough solution. That solution gets feedback from early adopters, which is funneled back into the Customer Development team for further refinement of the problem statement.
This reminded me a lot of how co-evolution works in nature and in genetic algorithms. You have two independent bodies that are individually optimizing along some sort of fitness function (access to food, longevity, sexual appeal), but the two bodies are necessarily intertwined and influenced by the success of each other. Wikipedia has some great examples from nature.
It was a great talk, and if you haven't started reading his blog, you should. Also read Steve Blank's blog and buy his book, as it's critical to realizing that you really have no idea.