In B2B, the person buying the product typically isn't the one using it. You need to dig beyond the buyers and talk to the actual users.
If you solve for buyers, you are likely to pancake your team and bloat your product with features.
If you solve for actual users and day-to-day problems then you will be more likely to work on the right things.
It’s ok to pass on opportunities that are outside the current focus of your product and business. It’s an essential part of maintaining focus and discipline and scaling.
Mature startups and Enterprises: sometimes the company you need to disrupt is your own. #consultingconvos
An increasing part of my strategic advisory work is to fill the role of Acting Chief Product Officer (CPO) for startups both large and small.
What does a Chief Product Officer do? They...
Business Priorities: Collaborate with all fellow execs (CEO, CRO, COO, CMO etc) to determine the business priorities
Define what product is: Establish and clearly communicate to all people and functions in the company what product is. Often product is a misunderstood concept. Many people who have not worked at product--lead companies tend to assume that if a feature or technology exists, then the product is ready for a given customer, market or user-case. This is not true and is a subject for another post.
Develop a product strategy: Work with all stakeholders (including sales, marketing, bizdev, CEO, product managers, engineers, support, customers, partners etc) to develop and articulate a clear, focused, ambitious, and pragmatic product strategy. Note that this strategy is distinct and different from the high-level business vision. It often acts as the connective tissue between the high-level business vision and the day-to-day tacts of the team.
Develop product principles: Establish and clearly communicate the core principles of the product to all stakeholders. In particular, to the product management team who need to make day-to-day decisions about priorities and features through the lens of these principles.
Set KPIs: Determine the high-level KPIs for the product that will ultimately drive the business priorities.
Develop a roadmap: Work with all stakeholders to craft a well-prioritized roadmap that ensures that each product cycle ladders up to meaningful new value for a large and growing number of customers. This might include a) de-emphasizing or pruning of the product so that the surface area being worked on is right-sized for the size and shape of the R&D team and/or b) inject more ambition into the kinds of features and polish that the team is aiming for.
Maintain alignment over time: Work with PMs, Engineers, Sales, Marketing, BizDev, Support etc to help them digest and execute on the roadmap without unintended strategy drift.
Maintain accountability: Hold PMs (and other functions) accountable for their effective execution
Escalation: Act as a point of escalation and conflict resolution when PMs are not getting what they need from other functions
Rinse and repeat
Along the way, there are a lot of landmines and complexities to navigate.
These might include a number of character archetypes that risk distracting or derailing the focused product strategy. Productboard has published a cute infographic to highlight some of these characters. I've included it below.
Much of the day-to-day work of product leadership is helping these "animals" to make more productive contributions to the product process. As mentioned above, this often starts by ensuring there’s a strong and principled product strategy that acts as a tool for company-wide alignment. A strategy is not enough, though. The product team must engage in a continuous and disciplined alignment process. Disciplined means that they stick to the strategy and principles despite the distractions inherent in the behavior of the archetypes listed below
To make incremental improvements: figure out the status quo and remove friction.
To make step function change: Figure out the ideal and work backwards.
Bias towards the former when you are at a successful steady-state that can benefit from slow and steady improvement. Bias towards the latter when you want to change the world.
Running an effective startup is often not about doing 1 big thing well. It's about doing hundreds of small things well - day in and day out.
Selecting advisors...
Your advisors should be career builders, not career talkers. In other words: ask yourself if they actually built and operated anything successful themselves?
Your array of advisors should be domain experts - one for each of the hard problems you're trying to solve. If you are in e-commerce, supply chain, and pool supplies, then you typically need an advisor(s) in each category. Sometimes you get lucky and find unicorns that have done a few of the categories you need - bonus!
Managing advisors...
Set up a series of standing meetings at a regular cadence.
Bring your biggest/hardest questions and opportunities for them to work on.
Ask them to sketch out an idealized version of any deliverables that your team needs to build.
Ensure that the team members who need to act on the feedback are in the meeting.
Ensure that their feedback is fully and readily digested and actioned before the next meeting.
Give the advisor a chance to respond to the work. Let them roll up their sleeves and make concrete suggestions for improvement (using cloud collaboration tools is helpful here. E.g. Google docs, Figma, etc)
Rinse-and-repeat
Evaluating advisors...
Your advisors should be helping you…
Save money by avoiding blown-out timelines and/or working on the wrong things in the wrong order.
Save opportunity cost by accelerating speed to market (avoiding disruption from competitors and other changing industry conditions).
Increase scale, growth, and profit by increasing the quality and ambition of execution so that the final result is more beautiful, useable, useful, and scalable.
Important: You are not paying for an advisor's time. You are paying for their decades of experience brought to bear in typically short, action-packed conversations that sharpen your focus, accelerate your business, and maximize your outcomes.
1. Style: The ability to engender confidence just from the sound of your voice. Particularly your cadence, word choice, and framing.
2. Managing up and sideways: The ability to tell your CEO and your peers in other functions what they need to hear - Often "no" and "later" - in a way that makes them feel good about the answer.
3. Good instincts: The ability to fast-forward to the right answer more quickly and more often than your direct reports. This doesn't mean you're never wrong or that you never admit that you're wrong (quite the opposite!). It means that - thanks to your experience and intuition - you tend to draw good conclusions and make good decisions that your team can rely on and benefit from.
When it comes to AAA employees, you don't pay for their time, you pay for the experience they bring with them to accelerate decision making and execution
I run into a lot of startups and larger enterprises who are somewhere along the journey of rebuilding their platform from the ground up.
There is a narrow set of legitimate reasons why you'd want to do this. And there is a narrow set of ways to do it well.
However, in most cases, rebuilding your platform from scratch is a mistake.
Why?
Because platform rebuilds almost invariably result in some combination of the following...
Engineers disappearing into a black hole for an indeterminant amount of time
Blown out timeframes that never seem to end
Building over-complicated tech that - when it finally ships - doesn't meet the needs of the customer
A constant battle to try to add new features or fix bugs in the legacy system while simultaneously hitting feature-complete with the new system (a moving target!)
Most importantly: Stalled value-creation for your customers
Instead - whenever possible - iterate your way to success. Break your product and platform down into small parts and improve each part one-by-one. Even of those iterations involve slightly larger refactoring projects of significant sub-systems. Do this in the order of "customer pain".
Finally, keep in mind that many engineers tend to push for re-writes. This is because it's often easier and more fun to start with a blank piece of paper than trying to live with legacy code while implementing an iterative improvement process. While this instinct is understandable, it can often be wrong for the product and the business. Pressure test this tendency hard.
Finally, as I said at the beginning - there are situations where rebuilding from scratch is necessary. That's a post for another day.
When dealing with the tension between comprehensive and comprehensible, you want to bias towards comprehensible. If a casual observer can't understand it, then no amount of detail will matter.
Often times the magic you think you need in your MVP is just icing on the cake that you can defer to later. Build the basic version first. Often that means setting aside the Machine learning, AI, Crypto, AR, VR stuff, and making something simple and valuable for people.
A lot of government regulation is ostensibly designed to preserve and protect the customer experience. The problem is, however, that regulation moves far too slowly, it can be corrupted by special interests, and enforcement is hard to scale. It often fails to live up to its intended promise.
Think of Uber. The medallion system and other regulatory conditions were ostensibly designed to protect riders from unsafe cars and unsafe drivers and from taxi companies flooding the streets with taxis. It failed. However, it created a number of unintended consequences and was ultimately hijacked by the taxi companies to create false scarcity and protect their business.
Uber‘s job was not to build a business that was respectful of regulation, but rather understand the original intent of regulation and create a technology framework that delivered an incredible customer experience - in a way that regulatory framework never could.
The regulatory system is now being forced to adapt.
Sometimes the entity your startup is disrupting is bad government.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
