The event NewCo Boston was held on on April 26 2016. This presentation was delivered by Joe Kinsella, the founder & CTO of CloudHealth Technologies. http://bos.newco.co/2016-schedule/

1. Agility Experienced.
Success Realized.
Joe Kinsella
CTO & Founder
CloudHealth® Technologies

2. Agility [uh-jil-i-tee]- moving quickly and easily,
intellectual acuity

3. About Me
 Founder & CTO of CloudHealth
Technologies
 Entrepreneur & technical executive
 Cloud computing enthusiast,
evangelist & blogger
 VPE at SilverBack & Sonian, Director
at Dell
Twitter: @joekinsella
Email: joe@cloudhealthtech.com
Blog: www.hightechinthehub.com
 Built large scale cloud public cloud infrastructure
 Passion for solving complex problems
 IT management software geek
 Member of “first Scrum team”

4. Agenda
 Introductions
 Agility In Founding a Company
 Agility In Finding Product Market Fit
 Agility In Growing a Company

5.  IT Infrastructure Management
 Cloud Management
CloudHealthTechnologies Background
Deep Domain Expertise
$20 Million in Venture Capital Raised
450+ Customers
100+ Employees
Headquartered in Boston, MA
 Offices in San Francisco and London
Revenue Growth
Customer Growth

6. My Agile Heritage
 Launched software career on
“first Scrum team”
 Team formed at crossroads of
old and new worlds –
Waterfall vs Agile
 Member of “first standup”
 Jeff Sutherland (manager) went on to become Scrum
evangelist & co-signer of Agile Manifesto
 Early lessons:
– Value of working directly with customers & working in cross-
functional teams
– Never stop innovating

7. An Agile ApproachTo
Founding a Company
“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the
successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is
pure perseverance.”
--Steve Jobs

8. Taking the Leap
 Starting company is highly irrational act
 Worked to manage all downside risks
until one day it no longer seemed risky
 Took non-traditional approach
– Started with market instead of product
– Started with experiments instead of
business plan
– Talked to investors before anything in which
to invest
– Formed team of advisors to complement
skills
– Sought “founding secrets”
“When your army
has crossed the
border, you should
burn your boats and
bridges, in order to
make it clear to
everybody that you
have no hankering
after home.”
--Sun Tzu

9. Finding the Market Opportunity
 Stayed close to passion & expertise
 Ran series of experiments using Lean
Startup methodology
 Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop
 Process
– Define critical hypotheses to test
– Design experiment that efficiently tests
hypotheses
– Rinse & repeat
 Remain objective
 Early experiments: The Free Tool, The Ad
Campaign, The Poll, Me as a Service
“Startups that
survive the first few
tough years do not
follow the
traditional product-
centric launch model
espoused by product
managers or the
venture capital
community.”
--Steve Blank

10. Building the MVP
 MVP came from series of MVFs
 Finding the Minimum Viable
Feature (MVF)
– Identity minimum investment required
to deliver value for subset of customers
– Deliver feature
– Gather feedback / data
– Rinse & repeat
 Follow the customer & adapt vision
 Iterate in the presence of customers

11. Selling the MVP
 1st customer came from Lean
experiment called The Sale
 Experiment designed for failure but
had unexpected success
 Key behind early success
– Customer-driven development honed value proposition
– Targeted “earlyvangelist” customer
– Articulated vision for future product
 Drove metrics-driven process to quantify effort
 If you’re not being rejected, you are not trying

12. An Agile ApproachTo
Finding Product Market Fit
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have
said faster horses.”
--Henry Ford

13. Hiring the EarlyTeam
 You can found a company alone,
but you need a team to build one
 No margin for error in early hires
 Good hiring maximizes chance to
achieve product market fit
 Hire only proven startup pros
 Early executives must be strong
individual contributors
 Don’t sacrifice culture for talent
 Don’t sacrifice right for fast
 Fail fast on bad hires

14. Searching for Product Market Fit
 Most startup failures result from inability to achieve
“product market fit”
 Product market fit = being able to reproduce the
sale of a product in a market with consistency
 Product market fit results from series of epiphanies
derived from executing in a market
 Often takes 3-5 epiphanies to achieve fit “string of
pearls”
 Epiphanies can include market, product,
distribution, business model, branding
– E.g. Facebook = initial focus on college student (target market) +
student-focused features (product) + vertical college rollout
(distribution) + advertising (business model)

15. Everyone Is a Product Manager
 Highly collaborative approach to
driving product allowed rapid
attainment of product market fit
 Product management is not a
department – it’s a company
 Drive continuous customer
engagement
 Become voice of customer, not its gatekeeper
 Continuously test assumptions
 Minimize distractions for engineering
 Drive internal feedback loop to learn from mistakes
Product
Market Fit

16. An Agile ApproachTo
Growing a Company
“We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls
and looks like work.”
--Thomas Edison

17. Driving an Agile Culture
 Hire collaborators
 Make customer engagement your
internal currency
 Continuously innovate across all
functions
 Drive tight feedback loops
 Make work products visible
 Drive collaborative decision making
 Continuously test assumptions
 Build adaptability into processes
 Make series of small bets

18. Product Development at CloudHealth
 Seasonal releases with 5-10 major
themes (“epics”)
 Execute seasons in 6-7 two week
sprints
 Sprints include work for themes, enhancements, internal
improvements & bug fixes
 Continuously deploy software (daily) with feature flags
 Announce releases once a week
 Sprints start with sprint planning, end with retrospective
 Sprint planning includes two halves:
– Business – review results of previous sprint, plan for next
sprint, enhancements & issues
– Technical – review detailed backlog & plan sprint

19. Driving an Agile Product Strategy
 Value throughput / adaptability over
predictability
 Make series of small bets instead of
one big one, e.g.
– CloudHealth partner channel & entering
the enterprise market
 Don’t let competitors distract you from customers &
prospects
 Adapt execution to need
– Emerging – experimental mode where there exists unknowns
– Tactical – solving for current known business need
– Strategic – solving for future demand
 Always execute in context of product vision

20. Managing Agile Product Releases
 Contents of weekly releases can
vary based on engineering status
 Cross-functional team decides on
Friday what is ready to ship
 Just in time approach to
documentation, help & training
 Monday afternoon release update
goes out to all users
 Leverage in-app notification as
secondary channel
 Agility has become our brand

21. Finding Outlets For Innovation
 Hackathons
– 24 hours of freeform hacking on ideas related to
CloudHealth
– Self-organizing cross-functional teams
– Concludes with presentations by each team to
company
– Prizes awarded via Yankee Swap over dinner
 CloudHealth University
– Every 3 week classroom for learning about new
topics
– Course topics crowd sourced
– Instructors from across organization
 Demo Days
– Every sprint starts with Demo Day
– Drink beer, eat pizza, socialize, show cool stuff

22. Final Lessons
“All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start
companies but because the will to create is encoded in
human DNA.”
--Reid Hoffman

23. My Lessons from Founding CloudHealth
 It’s all about the customer
 Work with people for whom building products is a
passion, not a job
 Operate with openness & transparency
 Integrity matters
 Value people over process
 Vision is a compass, not a map
 The enemy is outside the gate
 Listen
 Fail fast
 Enjoy the ride