There is so much information involved in the creation of new products, as well as through minimum viable product (MVP) iteration and eventually growth. However, startups and R&D teams rarely collaborate enough to effectively harness this information.

Therefore, a friend of mine and I founded Social Ergonomics, a consulting firm for startups and other companies in the San Francisco Bay Area in California, to enable them to act as Integrated Product Teams (IPTs), a concept I learned from my government R&D days.

IPT members need to do:

• Stakeholder research to deeply understand the problems and the stakeholders affected by them so that they can make smart decisions when the answers aren’t obvious — over time as stakeholders and their contexts change.
• Market research to be able to explain why their solution is better than all other possible solutions.
• MVP iteration to commercialize their product / find problem-solution fit and product-market fit
  • To be able to evaluate whether users resonate with their solution enough to evangelize it to others (p-s fit)
  • To be able to evaluate whether people are willing to pay for their solution, and keep using it and paying for it over time as it remains useful (p-m fit)

To support these needs, we created a tool we called PMBoard and made it open source on GitHub.com: https://github.com/bobness/pmboard

• For stakeholder research, it includes a widget to link Google Documents and tag them with insights.
• For market research, we envisioned a widget to link research insights with user journeys.
• For MVP iteration, we envisioned a widget to link research insights and user journeys to designs and software prototypes and user analytics data.

However, we never got around to the last two widgets. So the tool to tag user research looked like this: