One of my colleagues on ‘execution’:
“People always hear that execution is everything in startups.
The problem is that they think “execution” is all about more action. But that’s like an amateur running onto a pro basketball court and running around throwing the ball in the air.
Execution is about getting the ball in the hoop and all of the skill, experience and muscle memory it takes to make that happen”.
When working on product marketing (how you will brand and merchandise your products on marketing materials like your website) you want to be sure to avoid “shipping the org” (i.e. describing things based on the way they were built by internal teams) or doing things for the sake of appearances (e.g. trying to show more products than you have).
You’re number one priority should be to think through the problems and use cases your customers have and describe your product in those terms as clearly and simply as possible.
If you're meeting with VCs, make sure you're meeting partners, or make sure the associates you're meeting with are ultimately introducing you to Partners. If that's not happening, you're probably not getting anywhere.
Brand and product design can be such an important yet subtle aspect to your business success. It's easy to dismiss it as unimportant frosting on the cake, but investors, customers and partners can so often make split second decisions based on subconscious cues like pixel alignment and colors.
Conferences are good, but must be supported by other marketing activities like a campaign/topic specific micro-site, Webinars, Blog posts and other materials to maximize impact and conversion from the "oh wow" moment to the "sign me up" action.
As someone who's tried, too many times, to build a platform first product strategy (leveraging 3rd parties for distribution with a white label infrastructure play) I strongly suggest you DON'T.
Unless you're building extremely primitive services (think Twillio, AWS etc) you should instead build a killer user-facing (consumer or business user) app (hard!), and then offer APIs, Widgets etc for 3rd parties to adopt once they have no choice but to play along.
Think FB Social Plugins, YouTube Player, Twitter Tweet Embeds etc.
When evaluating and compensating for your weaknesses, I suggest taking a multi-faceted approach:
Be sober and honest about your weaknesses - but also be fair and kind to yourself too. Don’t, however, allow yourself to be crippled by neurosis (i.e obsessing).
While you may never turn them into strengths, lean into improving your weaknesses. At the very least you will understand them better and minimize your blind spots.
Don’t minimize the importance of things you can’t do just because you can’t do them. Recognize their value and...
Don’t obsess about turning your weaknesses into strengths. Focus more on your natural and unique abilities and surround yourself with people you trust who make up for your weaknesses. Be explicit with them about their role in your life and in your business. Ask them to help you handle or advise on those aspects of your life and work.
Listen to the people you hire/surround yourself with! Their advice may, at first, appear wrong. That's because it's not what you would normally do. Do it anyway.
As a young startup, the things you must avoid include...
Biting off more than you can chew
Protracted timelines/scope creep that can blow out
Over engineering your solution before you know what your users really need
Vague requirements
Poor/miscommunication between stakeholders
Over promising and under delivering
This is why MVPs and strong cross functional process is essential.
Reminder: If your problem is getting from A to B then the MVP is a skateboard (then a bicycle, then a motorbike, then a little hatchback, then a sedan, then a Porsche), not 4 wheels.
When working on product design:
First you want to get the "architecture" right (E.g. what are the core areas/screens/patterns)
Second, the UI metaphors (e.g. Are lists, feeds, carousels etc the right thing to do in each situation)
And finally, the fine grained details (is it 'your stuff' or 'my stuff', is it 'overview' or 'summary', is it 'done' or 'complete' etc).
Be careful of your personal narratives and biases. They might be getting in your way and sabotaging your stated goals. For example:
Fundraising is not 'grovelling for money' - it's sharing your ideas and looking for partners who want to join you on the journey.
Monitor for any internal struggle between wanting to build a 'lifestyle business' and 'high-growth startup'. Both are fine, but they are different things and you should pick one intentionally.
All the data, opinions and ideas are the raw material piled up at the start of the process. Ultimately it’s up to you what gets packaged up and sent down the line for assembly (in the form of a PRD).
If debates are going on too long it’s your job to drive a decision, codify it into a PRD and send it down the line to design or engineering.
“Given that we have limited resources, what would you say is more important, that it looks good or it's technically accurate?"
As the product manager, your job is ultimately to make it both. The trick is to break the problem down into discrete product "moves" such that each move is both beautiful and functional.
The process is not to figure out what resources you have and then work backwards to something you can ship. Your job is to figure out what you believe the user needs and figure out how to marshal your resources to get you there.
Usually, that requires you to create a shared purpose and mission for your team, a reasonable roadmap of discrete releases/moves and the discipline and focus to keep everyone's eye on the prize.
It depends.
If you feel like you have great product-market fit, and there's a large market of like-minded customers you can dominate: Listen to existing customers and continue to incrementally improve your product.
If you feel like you have great and growing product-market fit, but there isn't a big, profitable market left to conquer (or you've found yourself in a product/market you're not passionate about anymore): Sell to someone who wants to tap that market.
If you feel like you don't have great product-market fit and can't see a path towards finding it: Pivot, hard. Ignore existing customers and focus all your resources on the new direction.
Enterprise sales is very, very hard. But if you can build a team of strong people, process and pipeline it can be a real competitive advantage.
As a Strategic Advisor, there’s two ways to handle first calls:
Option 1. Talk about how you could help, in theory, if they formalize the relationship with you. In this case you’re leaning on scarcity and mystery.
Option 2. Help as much as you possibly can, for free. In this case you’re hoping they understand the immediate value and recognize that the devil is in the implementation details.
I prefer option 2.
Add value. The rest takes care of itself.
Show me the money!
Devs (especially top 50 apps from FB to Eventbrite) care about new users, re-engagement and money.
Unless your platform is solving fundamental technical challenge like SMS, Voice/Video etc (i.e. you're offering "nice to have" features) you need to demonstrate - in as concrete terms as possible - how you are going to drive new users, more sessions or more money for the developer.
As a Product Manager: You set the priorities and scope. Engineers set the date.
If you have a fixed date you need to hit, then you must de-scope until engineers feel comfortable they can hit the date.
High growth startups are about raising capital & burning it. Not making revenue & earning it.
My friend just asked me how Uber scaled so fast. My off-the-cuff answer:
Huge ambition/vision/appetite - this animates and motivates everyone and everything
First principles thinking - this leads to ignoring legacy constraints and encourages new innovative thinking/solutions
Fearless execution with ownership/accountability at the edge - which allows everyone to move fast without waiting for permission
I’d also add...
Bias towards action - move fast. Have the meeting this week, not next week
Hire strong operators that, in-turn, hire strong operators.
Of course, these are some of the same things that got it in trouble too.
Investors have limited bandwidth and a chunk of capital they need to put to work.
Don’t try to minimize your funding ask thinking it will be easier to get a “Yes”. You need to be asking for the right amount of money to put you on a trajectory to win your category and get a 100x return on their bet.
Anything less than that is uninteresting and comes across as naive.