Surviving the Valley of Death!
Short personal thoughts, reflections, and ideas
Product development’s “valley of death” refers to the critical phase between a product’s initial concept and its successful commercialization 💰.
Many promising ideas and innovations fail to reach the market during this period. The metaphorical “valley” represents the challenges and obstacles that must be overcome to transition from a viable prototype to a profitable product.
After roughly two years of full-force development of Columinity, Christiaan Verwijs, Denny de Waard, and I cautiously concluded that we seem to have survived the valley of death… 🫣
Some of the challenges we’ve addressed are:
- How do we fund the development without using investors?
- How do we ensure our product is technically feasible, scalable, and meets all required standards through comprehensive testing and validation?
- Do customers value/need our product? Are we solving the right problems for our customers? 🤷♂️
- How do we determine an optimal pricing strategy that balances market competitiveness, customer value perception, and profitability?
- What are we going to stop — as The Liberators — to create space for the development of Columinity?
- How do we ensure our product is secure against potential threats and vulnerabilities throughout its development and lifecycle?
- How do we comply with privacy regulations like GDPR and other relevant data protection laws to avoid legal issues and gain customer trust?
- How can we form strategic partnerships to support product development and market entry?
- And much more… 😅
Most importantly, how can we make this an enjoyable experience for ourselves?
Does this mean it’s only unicorns 🦄 and rainbows 🌈 from now on?
Probably not. It does mean we’re on the right track.
✅ Customers are willing to pay for our product, and based on feedback, it seems to provide them value and help teams improve (e.g., the LEGO Group, Hapag-Lloyd AG, Asian Development Bank (ADB), Alliander, and Liantis)
✅ We started promising partnerships with, e.g., Tribers and ACM Agile Türkiye
✅ We conducted research projects with Prof. Dr. Daniel Russo and explored collaborations with other academics like Dr. Karen Eilers; there’s more to come!
✅ We will redesign the flow of Columinity to support an action-learning-based approach to providing feedback to teams and helping them with more ongoing feedback.
✅ The content, materials, and workshops seem to offer value to the teams using it.
✅ Oh, and we’ve found Denny de Waard crazy enough to join the company 😅
After the summer, we’ll move forward again with new features, materials, content, meetups, and workshops.
If this post triggered you to learn more about Columinity and how it can help your team(s) improve based on scientific insights. Why don’t you give it a try? It’s free for individual teams and offers valuable features for multiple teams.
