Overcoming Optimism with a Premortem

I’ve been reading the excellent book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and came across a strategy for dealing with a common human behaviour problem that has direct impact on software development: overconfidence. According to Kahneman’s research, “overconfidence is a direct consequence of [how we think] that can be tamed — but not vanquished.” In other words, our brains are wired to make overconfident predictions and forecasts. In software development, this overconfidence usually presents itself in estimates of the importance of projects to the business, the success rate of new projects, and in development timelines....

January 24, 2018 · 2 min · Kevin Sookocheff

Three questions that define an ideal customer

One of the first steps in selling a new product or service is finding your target market and one of the best ways of finding your target market is by defining your ideal customer. Ask yourself – out of all the people in the world who would be the most likely to buy this thing? If you can clearly answer this question you have your ideal customer and you can start a marketing campaign targetting exactly the demographic you are trying to sell to. Let’s go through an exercise that can help to find that ideal customer by asking three simple questions. ...

January 4, 2014 · 2 min · Kevin Sookocheff

How to get accepted to a business plan competition

I recently received the good news that my business idea was accepted for the University of Saskatchewan’s 2014 Tech Venture Challenge. The Tech Venture Challenge is a business plan competition for students and alumni where participants are judged by their finished business plan and pitch after a four month workshop program. I’m going to blog about the experience as a way to absorb the material and hopefully help someone else who may be applying in the future. This post will provide some admittedly biased advice on submitting your application to the Tech Venture Challenge. ...

December 19, 2013 · 3 min · Kevin Sookocheff