The road to product hell is pathed with "It's already on the roadmap", "it's on strategy", "it's a quick win"
Product & Startup Builder
The key customer-facing roles for a Dev Platform
Running a developer platform? Make sure you have the right customer-facing teams…
1. Developer Relations (DevRel) team: stateless, performative, 1:many representatives that get the community fired up and help every-day developers however they can
2. Partner Engineering team: stateful, high-touch 1:few support of strategic partners.
3. Customer Success team: stateful, mid-to-high touch 1:few support for onboarding customers pre and post-sales.
Copywriting is a big part of design
Copywriting is a massively under-rated part of product design.
The right word choice on a button can change its effectiveness from being unintelligible to crystal clear without changing a pixel.
Scale is the goal
Scale is the most important goal for any startup. It's one of the key things that drive massive disruption.
But how do startups scale? How do large companies act and disrupt as startups do?
That's the number one thing that most founders and companies I encounter struggle with. They're often moving too slowly or building technology that is too hard to sell, support, and use. What follows is my attempt to explain the process of product development and scale as simply and clearly as I can:
Scale requires growth
Growth requires repeatability
Repeatability requires standardization
Standardization requires polish
Polish requires focus
Focus requires prioritization
Prioritization requires that you make hard choices
Making hard choices requires saying no
Saying no requires discipline
Discipline requires conviction
Conviction requires a combination of vision, faith & data
Vision and faith requires leadership
But what do each of those things really mean?
I've written a presentation that explains each step. Grab it below.
You need to give a shit!
You can do all the business analysis in the world - but if you don't give a shit about solving a specific problem or injustice you see in the world, your business likely won't work. Or worse, it will work and you'll be stuck having to manage something you aren’t passionate about day-in and day-out.
How do you build products and businesses that can't be stopped?
The answer: Flywheels
Flywheels, in the context of product and business, are when “Thing A” encourages/drives “Thing B” that then, in turn, drives “Thing A”. Around and around, faster and faster.
A common and basic example of a Flywheel is the following phenomena on Facebook: Users on FB invite other users which, in turn, makes FB more useful, which then encourages more users to join Facebook.
Flywheels create acceleration and defensibility in your business. If they gather enough momentum, they make your business unstoppable. So, as you can imagine, they are a pattern that many product managers and startup founders try very hard to create.
Flywheels should...
Be built into your core product user experience
Be designed around an interaction model whereby the more users use your product, the better your product becomes to use
Feel like a natural part of the primary utility of your product
To do this your product will likely need to...
Work very well in 'single-player mode'. This is important to overcome cold-start bootstrap problems
Have a compelling 'multi-player mode' that feels like a natural and powerful part of the primary purpose of the product
Offer incredibly easy ways to invite friends or colleagues
Provide an incredibly easy and slippery onboarding funnel for invited users
A good counter-example of an effective Flywheel is offering users a discount code to share with friends or colleagues. This is not organic to the core utility of your product, nor does it make the experience better for either user. Another good counter-example is manual business development or sales activities. These are not deeply built into your product and are therefore too slow and cumbersome to scale.
The changing role of product as your business matures
The role of product manager adjusts depending on the state of the company and product
- Early product centers more around defining the market, developing a hypothesis about your value, and finding product/market fit.
- Established product canters more around taking the product to the next level with data-driven polish and iteration, and finding appropriate adjacent opportunities
B2B Buyers are NOT your users
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.
Focus means saying no
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.
Internal disruption
Mature startups and Enterprises: sometimes the company you need to disrupt is your own. #consultingconvos
What does it mean to be a senior product leader?
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
Incremental vs Step function change
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.
Avoid silver bullet thinking
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.
How should you choose, work with, and evaluate your advisors?
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.
3 key characteristics of a VP of Product
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.
It's not about time, it's about experience.
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
Should you rebuild your platform from scratch?
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.
Comprehensive vs Comprehensible
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.
You don't need AI for your bootstrapped MVP startup idea
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.
Sometimes the entity your startup is disrupting is bad government
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.