Product Market Fit is the holy grail of early-stage startups, but it is so poorly understood. It’s why I’ve previously posted on Why PMF is a bad target. Since then, I’ve refined my thinking around how to make it more measurable, and, therefore a better target. It needs to be…

“Should we use Scrum, Kanban, or SAFe?” is a version of a question I get asked all too often. I’ve found it’s more useful to answer these questions systemically by looking at what weakness the team has behind the question. — As the ‘Product’ discipline is still developing, there are so many new ways of doing things. I often get asked what the best tool, methodology, or framework is to use for product roadmaps, creating a strategy, or running a backlog. The answer is always the same: It depends.

Despite being a relatively new discipline, Product Management is incredibly popular as a career choice. It is often seen as easy to get into because it is so wide-ranging. This is aided by its intersecting with many other disciplines, from engineering to design, operations and customer support. It also means that the role has a different flavour in every company and that there are so many intersecting paths that it can be confusing at any career stage, especially at the beginning.

A vast majority of startups don’t raise series A. 2022 saw only a third of the number of Series A than Seed rounds in Africa. This is because the rubber hits the road at Series A, and investors are no longer gambling on the possibility of a hypothetical opportunity. By this stage, you need to be a real business with solid fundamentals. But what does that even mean? — Raising funding is hard. Investors all have different mandates and needs. This leads many founders not to know what to show or how to meet the investors’ expectations and explain their investment case in the best possible way.

Product management is a hot topic these days, and with the rapid rise in adoption, it’s clear that a Product Manager can bring a lot of value when building software. A side effect of this explosion in popularity has led everyone to have their own definition of a “Product Manager”…

The most successful founding teams for startups are balanced. They have complementary skills that cover the spectrum of what the startup will need to excel. …

Getting direct feedback from customers is critical when building relevant, successful products. Regular customer feedback loops are one of the most apparent indicators of a great team in a startup as it shows that they are solving a problem based in reality — and not just in their heads. Often…

I often see images of the above shared in product groups when questions arise about the “right” way to build new products. But there is no single “right” way to build a new product. Founders that we work with often start with the expectation that there is a single “right”…

As Africa’s technology startup sector booms, knowing where to source timely, relevant founder support can be confusing for tech entrepreneurs. If you’re an early-stage Africa-focused founder, working out which startup support program to subscribe to might well be as critical as deciding which investor/s to tap for funding. Aligning the…