If you’re a large enterprise - your post-covid, digital transformation opportunity is not to build a great app - it’s to rethink your business model and customer journey to be more scalable, sustainable, user-friendly and delightful. Typically that’s enabled by technology, but it requires a holistic and first principles approach.
Product & Startup Builder
How to burn your money
Think there are two ways to go with managing your startup burn.
1. Optimize for keeping the lights on as LONG as possible. Even if that means not hiring key people who can help you fast-track your success.
2. Hire key (effective) people and make things go as FAST as possible. Even if that shortens the runway.
The problem is that in both cases you spend all the money. but with option 1 you're ALSO spending opportunity cost. I.e. Someone else will come along and disrupt you before you have a chance to get properly situated in the market.
Don't listen to Sales and Engineering too much
Sacrilege/Trigger warning:
As a product leader, when developing the product strategy and roadmap: I am more interested in what Design and Product Marketing says than what Engineering and Sales have to say.
Why? Because...
Sales: I can't over-index on what 1 customer thinks they need. Specific customers can be important inputs, but they don't know how to build generalized product. They only understand their particular pain. If they had their way we would build features to solve everything going on in their organization. It's our job - as a product lead company designed to scale - to determine, implement, and encourage best practices that work across companies and industries.
Engineering: I can't over-index on how it works or what the technical limitations. Engineers are amazing partners and collaborators but their focus is on implementation details and development effort. It's our job - as a product lead company designed to scale - to look past what we think is possible and focus on what customers really need. In my experience - once challenged - engineers are wizards who can ultimately build anything that's asked of them.
In other words:
1. Don't ask customers (plural) what they want. Ask them what pain they feel.
2. Have an opinion about what you're building and what you are NOT building. This includes the best practices or ideal flows for solving problems in a first-principles, digital-first way.
3. Design something great.
4. Challenge your engineers to build it in small, digestible iterations.
In yet other words: LEAD!
Avoid advisor fatigue!
I bump into a lot of founders who are bewildered by all the contradictory advice they get.
Go b2b! Go Enterprise! Go b2c. Sell it for cheap! Sell it for a premium price! Grow! Scale! Revenue! Raise money! Don't raise money!!!!
Be careful about speaking to too many advisors - particularly random, one-off conversations.
Every advisor has their biases and knee-jerk instincts. It can really confuse you.
You need to pick 1 or 2 key people you trust and like. Together, you develop a long-term relationship. As a team, you will develop a single medium-term strategy. Then all the advice/tactics should be aligned with that strategy over a sustained period of time.
Investors are stupid
As a founder, you need to remember that compared to you, many investors are pretty stupid when it comes to your startup and your journey.
Why?
It could be for a number of different reasons. Including...
1. Many investors have never been operators. They don’t really know what it’s like.
2. Angels are distracted with their real life. It’s hard to get and keep their attention.
3. You have likely spent a lot more time thinking about the problem you’re working on and the market you’re targeting. If you’re doing it right - you’re the expert.
To compensate for this “stupidity” (and derisk their decisions) investors use 1 simple trick: Pattern matching.
They look for simple signals like “two founders” or “revenue”. So always remember:
1. Don’t get upset if they don’t get it. It’s your job to get and keep their attention. Then it’s your job to educate them.
2. Take their feedback with a grain of salt.
Go for growth!
I feel like I say this every few months. But let me say it again:
If your goal is to build a silicon valley style high- growth venture-backed startup, your primary goal is not revenue. It is growth. Period.
The formula for growth is simple (but not easy):
Build a product that people immediately fall in love with and continue to use for a long time.
Don’t obsess about charging them. Don’t try to force it down their throats through partnerships and b2b. Don’t make it too complicated to use and understand. Don’t spend forever building it; ship it and learn from actual user behavior.
Finally, if you are building a software-based startup and you are not aiming for global rapid growth, you are likely burning a lot of opportunity cost. The reason tech startups are interesting in the first place is because Software scales globally. Aim for scale. Change the world! If you don’t, someone else will. And they will likely disrupt you eventually.
Determining founder equity
If there’s a dispute about founding equity simply go back and revisit the story.
Determine everyone’s role getting the business to it’s current state and their intended participation moving forward.
There are standard equity positions for each role and each contribution based on industry best practices.
- Advisors get ~0-5% (depending on role and stage)
- Investors get ~20-30% per round
- Employees get ~2-3x their salary in options
- Operational/full time Cofounders get ~10-30% each (assuming 2-3 cofounders) 
No one should get 50/50 just ‘cause. #consultingconvos
Dealing with unprofessional colleagues
If someone is being unprofessional in your work interactions - particularly in group meetings - you must confront them about it 1:1.
You teach people how to treat you. If you tolerate disrespect you will continue to receive disrespect.
Schedule a meeting with the person and let them know that their behavior does not work for you. Encourage them to provide their feedback and concerns in a way that is constructive or in private.
If this doesn’t work, escalate to their manager. If that doesn’t work remove them from your meetings.
As a PM, how accountable are you for the success of the product and the business?
Both 10% and 90%.
The product is accountable 10% because while the product need to be amazing; sales, marketing, support, bizdev, finance, etc etc all need to align and do their part to inform, package and sell the product. A great product poorly sold can't succeed.
However, the product *function* (lead by the head of product) is accountable 90% because it's his or her job to drive alignment across all other functions. A great PM knows that building a great product requires great alignment across all internal and external stakeholders (i.e. the market).
Getting conviction
Team conviction ultimately doesn’t come from data. It comes from leadership.
Be more ambitious with your hiring.
Particularly at the beginning - but also throughout your company’s growth - your goal should not just be to add a but in the seat or a soldier to the army.
Aim to hire rockstars that raise the average quality/effectiveness of the team. If you’re the smartest person in the room you should be very uncomfortable.
If you think you’re company isn’t well-positioned to attract great talent - perhaps because the vision, mission, culture, or brand isn’t strong enough - then ask yourself why are you are content to work for something that wouldn’t excite rockstars?
Work on something great, and invite great people to help.
Combative vs. Collaborative work styles
In some older workplaces and workstyles, there is a tendency to assert authority and insist on certain outcomes using a combative and confrontational style.
This no longer works. In modern companies and work cultures, the goal is to create a collaborative and open environment whereby everyone is encouraged to express their perspective, concerns, and creative ideas freely.
In these environments, a leader's role is not to confront members of the team, but rather ask them questions that identify blind spots, flesh-out under-developed ideas and encourages everyone to do their best work
Rather than asking "Why didn't you...", the question should be "Why don't we...". Instead of saying "You totally missed the point..." the observation might be expressed "I think there's an area we need to explore more...".
Importantly, this doesn't suggest that communication should be vague. It should be precise and actionable. It just doesn't need to make the other person feel like they're under attack.
Should the product team get involved in shaping technical architecture?
Should the product team get involved in shaping technical architecture?
In general, Product Managers (PMs) should not get too involved in making technical design decisions.
Instead, product managers can contribute by facilitating a conversation with engineering and engineering leadership around the following topics:
Principles
The PM would list the key non-functional requirements for the product. Each might imply a certain technical choice or approach. For example:
a) It must be possible for different teams and engineers to work on various parts of the system independently. This might imply a clear separation of concerns between various parts of the system.
b) We want to invent as little as possible. Instead, we want to prioritize time to market. This might imply the use of off-the-shelf cloud services or open source wherever possible.
c) We want to be able to hire from a large pool of engineers who have experience with our tech stack. Which might imply the use of popular tools rather than new, experimental tech.
d) We should know the moment something breaks or does not function as expected. Which might imply automated testing and alerting for every component.
Visibility
The PM should sit with the engineering team and walk them through the roadmap. While doing so, they should pay special attention to patterns that might repeat or features/requirements that may need to expand over time.
For example: "This concept of transforming data from X to Y happens a lot. You can see it here, here and here." or "Being able to connect to this address book for a list of user contacts is just the beginning. Over time we will want to give the user the option to connect to a wide range of 3rd party address books"
The former implies that a particular component might be generalized to handle lots of data transformations across the system. The latter implies that the address book importer will ultimately need to be designed to support multiple connectors and data types.
Time
Give engineers the time they need to do thoughtful technical designs, reviews and builds so that they can make more durable medium-term decisions. If everything is an emergency -working to a hard deadline - engineers will cut corners to get the job done for you.
Engineering reviews
Encourage the engineering team to have technical design review meetings with each other to pressure test proposed design decisions against the principles and roadmap.
Permission to refactor
Finally, remember it’s ok for engineering to refactor code later. Particularly early in a startups life where product-market fit is still a challenge. If they are not building just enough to make the user experience work well, then they risk over-engineering the solution and getting stuck building things for far too long instead of shipping new value to the market and iterating.
Collectively, this will all help the engineering team make great decisions without the product team getting too prescriptive. It will also help the engineering team avoid over-building sophisticated things that no one will use.
Product and Eng
Product and Eng shouldn’t be in separate “departments”. They should be in the same mission driven group solving problems together.
Should you hire remote workers?
The only thing more powerful than having a group of people in a room working on a problem is having the best people anywhere in the world working on that same problem. Virtual teams allow you to pick the best talent - wherever they may be.
Should your business focus on sustainability?
Short answer: Yes
Long answer: Yes because...
1. The environment will die without us all pulling our weight and improving the situation. Without the environment the economy (and your company) is dead
2. Green is often cheeper over the long term. Control the climate in your stores better with insulation to save on aircon. Solar energy installations pay for themselves long term etc etc
3. There is a large and growing base of customers who are prioritizing a) simplicity b) minimalism c) quality d) sustainability in their products and brands. They are increasingly finding their needs met by new, direct to consumer companies online. No stores, no fuss.
How can you tap into this new opportunity?
The twist is that all these new priorities are actually about sustainability.
Simplicity & minimalism is about doing more with less effort and less stuff. Quality is about buying things once and not having to throw it out and get a new one.
So, while developing your sustainability strategy, don’t forget that it’s about much more than just materials and process. It’s also about...
1. How your product or service is designed: Simple and easy to use.
2. How your product or service AND brand (often overlooked) looks and feels: Minimalist. Clean.
3. How your product or service is constructed: High quality build. Built to last. And finally and most obviously...
4. How your product or service is manufactured and delivered: Recycled materials. Second hand markerplace. Recyclability. Etc
As a PM, where does your data come from?
As a PM, a big part of your job is collecting and triangulating data. Where does that data come from?
Customers (short term)
Sales feedback
Support feedback
Usage analytics
Customer interviews
Focus groups
Churn reasons
Business (medium-term)
Where does the business want to go?
Where does the board expect to go?
Where are the new markets and new opportunities?
What are competitors doing?
Your Vision (long-term)
Where do competitors seem to be going?
Where do technology and culture trends seem to be headed?
What framework do you have to help rationalize the world?
What niche do you want to fill?
What novel innovation can you and your product/company deliver?
It’s a feedback loop between all of these sources. Customer and business data should inform your vision and your vision should be a lens by which you filter customer and business data in and out of your plan.
Sometimes you need to go slow to go fast
So much of startup advice is essentially "focus more and go faster". But as always, it's not that simple.
As with anything in life, the devil is in the details, and wisdom is found by applying the right advice in the right context.
It is certainly true that you should execute your overall strategy with an appropriately high degree of hustle and ambition. This is essential to scaling fast and bending the curve up and to the right.
It is also certainly true that you need to break the problem you're working on (and the product releases you need to make) into small, lovable iterations that you can ship with a degree of expediency.
However, you must execute each tactical step with a degree of care and precision that sometimes requires you to slow down for a few moments or even a few days. This added time will allow you to properly think through the details and implications before you act.
Without this kind of precision, you risk making costly mistakes, thrashing your team, and essentially spinning your wheels while standing in place.
Are you paying enough attention to your cancellation funnel?
Everybody focuses on their on-boarding funnel. Make sure you spend equal amounts of time thinking about and refining your cancellation funnel. Reducing churn is just as important as increasing new user acquisition - perhaps more so.
Don't worry too much about what slips through your fingers
It's easy to focus on what's slipping through your fingers. Instead, focus on what you have in your grasp. Grab it, shape it, build off it.