In my experience its difficult to find someone with all the tools to approach this problem – the rare super-founder, but thats doesn’t scale too well. More often it becomes a group collaboration effort but the risk there is having too many people focused on the color of the bicycle shed instead of the primary mission.

In a startup, when YOU are “the business people” what do you do?

Thanks for your comments!

What this means for a starup then, since you have no customer, is that someone needs to play the role of the customer – deciding what features are most important right now, what “functionality theme” the current release will be offering the market, where to draw the line determining what set of features will make up the current release, etc.

It’s ideally best if this person is not a member of the technical team (e.g., a “product manager” is ideal for this role). But if it does have to be a member of the technical staff, then that staff member should try as hard as possible to “take off their technical hat” and “put on their business hat” when they make those decisions.

I have Steve’s book on order but in the meantime enjoy reading Eric Ries’ blog on the topic: http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/