Phil Ledgerwood

You team structures and composition are very dependent on your organization's context. You don't want to take a general, prescriptive recipe for what a "good team" should be and drop it on top of your organization. I have spun up teams for several different clients, both for their organizations and my own - each team specifically keyed for each project.

Customer success isn't just about defining goals and keeping metrics because the landscape is always changing for your customers. What are the structures and mechanisms in place that allow you to keep your fingers on the pulse of your customer needs and be able to adapt to them gracefully? This is one of the competitive advantages of my own company and I'm happy to help you craft your own strategies and tactics around this.

Software developers tend to design software in ways that make sense to software developers. On the other end of the spectrum, companies can pour amazing amounts of money into UX "research" of dubious value. We routinely have to design the ideal UX for a given user niche, and there's a lot that goes into it if you want to do it well without investing in activities that add little value.

My basic idea validation strategy is: do the smallest thing you can to get meaningful data that validates your idea. It sounds simple, but there's a lot of our own baggage that can get in the way of this, and sometimes it might be hard to know how to even start this effectively. (A lot of MVPs are neither M nor V, and sometimes not even P) I regularly have to come up with a wide variety of experiments for a variety of products and industries.

If you want your organization to be leaner and more agile, it requires new philosophies, new assumptions, and a lot of challenging of traditional management maxims. We can talk about not only how your mindset needs to change but how to go about the task of changing your mindset, and potentially the mindset of your entire organization.

From coming up with the MVP to the leanest, most agile-est (that's a word now) way to get that MVP out the door, to metrics, analysis, and pivoting, to funding and The Roadmap, I regularly help our clients do all these things and use the same processes to run my own company.

Ever have someone recommend tech or a tool to you because it's the hottest thing? Our clients do this all the time. But there's definitely a science to picking the right stack for your specific needs, and I have to do this every time for every new project my company takes on. Sometimes the stacks are radically different. It's all about the best-in-class fit for the goal.

I have a feeling this will happen anyway as we talk about the other areas in my Expertise, but in any case, I probably have gone through the same things you're currently going through and/or am with a client who is. I get it. Honestly, in today's marketplace, almost everything is scary and hard and so many things get in the way of the execution of your vision - including yourself, sometimes. I'm happy to give a listening ear, shoot whiskey with you, and maybe throw in a little perspective.

We do a lot of customer collaboration involving the exchange of documents, assets, etc. Dropbox has a good API around it. Like most tools, it's six of one half a dozen of the other to us, but this is a common repository several clients are familiar with.

This is one of the easier ways to get some basic analytics around how your site is being used. Depending on what specialized info you need, there are often better analytics tools available, but Google Analytics is great for a nice entry point into getting some good data around your site.

I am a LinkedIn fiend. Feel free to connect with me! It's still a great way to reach out B2B and create relationships, warm up leads, and establish authority. It can't be the only platform you're working, but it's a great one.

I've integrated MailChimp with a number of client apps and workflows. I'm not a promoter of it necessarily - an automated email system is an automated email system. But it's a very common one for people who are getting apps out the door.

As a prolific user of kanban, anything that can get us a good kanban board is handy to have in our back pocket. Trello is -not- my favorite tool for kanban, but a lot of clients are familiar with it and it's easy and free to set up. We often use it for off-the-cuff purposes where we want a kanban-style way of visualizing tasks but we don't need the rigors of using actual kanban.