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Assembling top individuals doesn't make a team. This article outlines how to design a small but solid team using three principles—role design, execution autonomy, and communication structure—along with the Quinn and Cameron organizational growth model.
Of Google's countless projects, only about 50% succeed. The company even runs a unique space called 'The Google Cemetery' that displays tombstones of discontinued services. Google dissects these failures like autopsying a body, identifying direct and indirect causes of problems, documenting them precisely, and establishing countermeasures.
Open innovation is a paradigm where companies must intentionally bring in external ideas and technologies, share internal assets with the outside world, and create value to survive and grow. In other words, it's about breaking down organizational boundaries and increasing the probability of innovation through active external engagement—clearly demonstrating why 'absorptive capacity' is a core competitive advantage for modern startups.
CODEX 7. If you don't know the difference between a product and a commodity, you're not an entrepreneur
Imagine you're a researcher who developed a functional food that solves insomnia. No matter how much you explain the superior ingredients—the combination of novel compounds A and B, 99% bioavailability, cutting-edge coating technology—customers look unimpressed. Why? People suffering from insomnia don't care about chemical formulas. What they really want to know is: "If I take this, will I truly sleep soundly and wake up refreshed?"
Customers don't buy products; they buy the value those products deliver—the 'commodity.' They're not buying the ingredients of a functional food (the product); they're buying the value of 'a comfortable morning' (the commodity). If you don't understand this difference, you'll remain a researcher who creates the best product yet fails to help a single person.
Successful founders design these two values with clear distinction.
Functional value
The performance, technology, and specifications inherent to the product itself. It answers 'what it can do.' For example, 'This app uses AI to automatically organize 100 schedule items.' While it can demonstrate technical superiority, this alone rarely persuades customers.
Business value
The actual benefit and reason to buy that the product gives customers. It answers 'why they should buy it.' For example, 'Every morning, we give you the gift of a well-organized, relaxed start to your day.' This moves customers emotionally and opens their wallets.
Startups must fight with limited resources, so they can't afford to be stuck on functional value alone. To survive, you must propose a clear business value that makes specific customers feel, "This is for me!"
So how do you design business value? Simon Sinek's Golden Circle theory provides a powerful compass for what to say to customers and how to say it.
The theory consists of three circles. WHY: Why do we do this? How do we want to change customers' lives? HOW: How did we implement that function differently? WHAT: What does our product do?
Most startups make the mistake of starting with WHAT (features). But what moves customers' hearts and opens their wallets is our belief and reason for existence—the WHY. We're not selling WHAT we make; we're selling the value that is WHY.
Let's look at how Calm, now a unicorn in the sleep and meditation app market, got started. In the early meditation app market, there were countless competitors. Most of them focused on functional value (WHAT).
Things like "We have 1,000 meditation tracks" or "Recorded in the voices of famous meditation experts."
These were good 'products,' but they lacked a compelling reason for customers to pay. Calm took a different approach. They focused on customers' deepest pain point: 'modern people's nights, unable to sleep due to anxiety and stress.'
The business value (WHY) Calm offered customers wasn't meditation files themselves. They led with the core value: 'To you who can't sleep, we give the gift of a peaceful night and a refreshed morning.' To deliver this, they created the innovative feature (HOW) of 'bedtime stories for adults.'
What customers paid for wasn't meditation audio files (the product), but 'the psychological relief of being able to forget the day's stress and fall asleep peacefully (the commodity).' Thanks to this clear value design, Calm overtook countless competitors to become the overwhelming market leader.
Step 1. Define WHY your product must exist
Clear away all the feature lists and start with the most fundamental question: "What problem are we solving for customers, and how do we want to make their lives better?" The answer to this question becomes your business value—your WHY.
Step 2. Design HOW you'll deliver that value
Establish the specific methods and principles for realizing your defined WHY. Like Calm's 'bedtime stories,' you need to consider: What is the most innovative approach to effectively deliver our value?
Step 3. Then decide WHAT to build
Finally, determine the specific features and services that will embody that value. The features decided at this stage are no longer a simple list of technologies. Each feature becomes 'evidence of value' with a clear reason that answers, "Why must our product exist?"
Features may be a technologist's pride. But customers don't buy pride—they buy a 'reason' that solves their problem. The moment you talk features, you have a product; but the moment you design the value customers want, you finally have a 'commodity.'
[Published with the consent of Brunch author jaha Kim, utilizing content from [Startup Codex 22].]
To explore more content by jaha Kim, visit the link below.