For many founders, “requirements gathering” sounds like one of those formal enterprise processes that belongs in a conference room with spreadsheets, flowcharts, and long meetings. In a startup, where speed is everything, it can feel like a luxury. I understand that perspective. After more than 15 years working in business analysis, technology implementation, and platforms such as Salesforce, I have…
Over the past fifteen years, I’ve watched founders make the same decision about outsourcing their first engineering work, and I’ve seen it play out in remarkably consistent ways. The pattern is this: when a founder decides to outsource instead of building their first sprint in-house, what goes wrong is almost never about the agency or contractors themselves. What goes wrong…
I’ve watched this unfold dozens of times over the years, and it almost always plays out the same way. A founder decides the team needs new software. It’s a legitimate business decision. The tool is objectively better. The implementation seems straightforward. But within weeks, something unexpected happens: the team isn’t using it. Or they’re using it halfway. Or they’re actively…
Over the past fifteen years, I’ve watched a pattern emerge so consistently that I can almost predict it now: a founder gets serious about understanding their business, decides they need “better data,” and within six months they’re collecting information they’ll never actually use. Not because they’re careless. Because they’re thinking about the problem wrong. The worst part? This mistake costs…
I watched a founder last year spend four months building a mobile app. It had beautiful design, smooth animations, offline functionality, and a complex recommendation algorithm. When they launched, they had two users. Both were friends. Three weeks later, they realized their actual problem wasn’t the mobile experience. It was that they had no customers. The product worked perfectly. The…