Don't forget simplicity.

We hear it so often in the small business and entrepreneurial world, that it has started to lose value. Yes, small businesses and entrepreneurs have an advantage over larger competitors because of our ability to remain nimble and move quickly. Yes, we all hope to capitalize on that advantage. I just returned from a great gathering and open discussion on ideas and best practices in product management in Boston over the past weekend. I got the chance to hear stories and learn from the practices of product managers in large organizations, small organiziations, and start ups. In particular, I noticed the complexity of effectively managing a product from within a large organization. Now, I have never worked for a very large organization, but I can only assume a level of bureaucracy needed to manage a large number of people as being neccessary, like this example. Unfortunately, I also spoke with a lot of people working in small organizations or startups that had intoroduced some very complex methods of product management into their organizations. This is too bad, because by doing this we lose one of our strongest characteristics. While I never promote ignorance, a certain level of nievity can't hurt in a small organization either. While I'm interested in seeing how large production teams manage their products, I can't imagine implementing their methods or best practices into a startup. Nor can I understand how a person would want to introduce such complexity into a small organization abeit for their own job security. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery In my view we can start a company that is so complex that it must be slow moving, or so simple that it is not possible to be slow. As we work on our organization (and it is always a work in progress), we need make the reduction of complexity our top priority for our business and for our customers.