Why You Need to Fail!

April 28, 2011

OpenView invited our portfolio companies into a 2-day product management forum today, led by product guru Marty Cagan. Marty has a really practical approach to helping companies get the best possible product and I highly recommend his book, Inspired.

I have been pushing failure on the OpenView teams and portfolio companies forever (example here) and I was really happy to hear Marty talking about the need for failure in the product management process. The basic fact is that you won’t get the best product and development effort without failing!

More broadly, if you are working on creating competitive advantage, business growth strategies, and/or company development strategies, then you should be designing experiments that will lead to fast results so that you can fail (most) quickly, but also find and grow the best successes!

Marty played some clips from this Derek Sivers video below that are very compelling. It is 15 minutes long, but well worth the time! My strong view is that you won’t build a great company without failing a lot, and perhaps this video will give you the confidence and conviction to fail more often!

Founder & Partner

As the founder of OpenView, Scott focuses on distinctive business models and products that uniquely address a meaningful market pain point. This includes a broad interest in application and infrastructure companies, and businesses that are addressing the next generation of technology, including SaaS, cloud computing, mobile platforms, storage, networking, IT tools, and development tools.