Founder-lead companies have an unfair advantage

One of the secret advantages of startups is that they are founder lead.

This makes it possible for them to act faster and bolder than companies lead by non-founder CEOs.

Why?

Because founders enjoy nearly limitless authority to make bold bets and get the company to follow.

Non-founder CEOs have to build a business case and bring the rest of the org with them.

Founders tend to have a seemingly endless well of ambitious change they want to create in the world and in their company.

Non-founder CEOs tend to be incrementalists who count beans.

So many companies, so few competent product managers.

So many companies, so few competent product managers.

Why? Some reasons include…

• A general scarcity of competent and experienced product managers in existence

• Bad hiring practices

• Lack of professional development investment in employees and a lack of service leadership in the team

• A misunderstanding of the role of Product Management leading to…

  • Underinvestment in the function - spreading the PMs too thin

  • Assigning/attributing the responsibilities of product management to designers, engineers, marketing or “CTOs

  • Leadership that is too intrenched in their own domain expertise or too overindexed on revenue at all costs applying inappropriate pressure and prescriptiveness on the few PMs they have - sabotaging their efforts

Ecosystem and Marketplace considerations

Building an ecosystem/marketplace requires a broad range of considerations. Some that came to mind today when discussing the subject with someone...

1. Figure out your Personas/Stakeholders. Each one may (likely) require a different kind of marketplace, tools, messages etc.

2. If you're at an existing company, remember that you will essentially need to set up a company within the company. This is because all the functions at the company are likely focused on your traditional customers rather than your ecosystem stakeholders.

So you will need people/sub-teams in...

• Product

• Marketing

• Ops

• Support

• Community

• etc
  

3. Remember that ecosystems/marketplaces take more time to develop than you'd expect - so set expectations correctly with your leadership team.

This is because, unlike normal products, you can't just work with internal stakeholders to ship features for users. You need to ship features, then you need to work with partners to consume/act in a certain way, then you can give it to end-users. Then once you learn from user behavior, it takes yet more time to coordinate all 3rd parties in order to make changes and retest.

4. Ecosystems and Marketplaces need a wide range of key decisions and frameworks - including...

• Clear definitions of stakeholders and per stakeholder:

• Asset/use-case types

• Distribution types

• Policies/incentives/guardrails

• Go to market/messaging

• Community engagement programs (1:many),

• Strategic partner engagement programs (1:few)

Generalized "Partnerships" and "Partnerships Teams" can really drive a lot of distractions for a company

Generalized "Partnerships" and "Partnerships Teams" can really drive a lot of distractions for a company.

They will often find a wide array of interesting "Partnership Opportunities" that are either inappropriate, ill-timed or scattered across a wide range of possible strategic directions for the business.

It's far better and more effective for Product and Leadership to define specific areas where 3rd parties can add value and then develop APIs, programs, personas, pitches, and packages for those stakeholders.

Nothing you do will work

The probability that your first product, value props, marketing messages, marketing automation, etc will work 100% effectively the first time is nearly zero.

Even if you spend endless time doing user research, gathering requirements, and so on (don't do that), you will have to pay close attention to real usage data and continue to optimize, optimize, optimize.

It's slow, painful, and thankless work. But it is essential.

How did Uber hire so many amazing people so fast? Solve the talent shortage at your company with these tactics.

It's beyond cliche to say that people are the most precious resource for any company.

It's also profoundly true.

Small teams of amazing people will out-execute large teams of mediocre people every time.

However, I’ve been spending more of my time with hyper-growth startups recently and they all have one thing in common right now: Massive hiring bottlenecks.

Here are some of my tips for accelerating your hiring process in these tough times.

Prioritizing

• Discuss hiring as a priority at each all-hands meeting. Give an update on all of the subjects below.

• Decentralize the problem. Encourage and empower each employee/team to source, interview and hire for their own team (as per tactics in this list)

• Add hiring outcomes to performance reviews. Show your seriousness about making it part of everyone's job.

• Add it to the onboarding education content for new hires (explain how to hire and why it’s part of their job).

• Do lunch-and-learns to train existing employees on how to hire well.

Sourcing

• Establish a great Careers page that explains the company's values, mission, and benefits.

• Proactively target former colleagues and great candidates on LinkedIn. Pitch them hard. For example...

  • Great people often ignore recruiters. Have hiring managers send personalized, super leaned-in reach-out messages.

  • Invite candidates to come see the office or meet senior people in the company.

  • Invite candidates to have lunch with the team.

  • Do all of the above before the interview process even begins.

Incentivizing

• Offer existing employees a meaningful bonus for successfully referring in their favorite former colleagues.

• Make compelling offers to candidates. Recruiting is expensive. Losing a candidate over compensation packages is a very costly waste of time.

Interviewing

• Do a quick hiring manager screen and as soon as they’re comfortable...

• Don’t waste time. Do 1-day interview loop with all key functions followed by a debrief/decision meeting within 24 hours. You and the candidate should know the outcome within a few days.

• Ensure the interview loop is well run so that the outcome is clear. The hiring manager should email all members of the loop and give them plenty of context about the role, the candidate and what specifically each person should be looking for (E.g. Sally, as Engineering Manager on the team, you're looking to understand how well this candidate will interact with your engineering team.)

• Ensure the experience is great for the candidate - even for candidates who are failing during the interview process or fail to get an offer. Word of mouth should be awesome to encourage other candidates to interview too.

Closing

• Get senior leaders to reach out and congratulate the candidate on getting an offer - perhaps even have the CEO do it.

• Send “Love bombs”: The entire interview loop and the people the candidate would be working closely with should email and share their genuine enthusiasm about them potentially joining the team.

Maintaining

• Don’t lower the quality bar. Ensure bar-raisers are part of the interview loop to mitigate bad hires for expediency,

• Make sure that existing employees are engaged, motivated, and empowered to do their best work. Attrition is a killer. This might include firing low performers who are undermining team morale and effectiveness.

No, I won't sign your NDA before our initial meeting.

Like most professional investors, I don't tend to sign NDAs prior to a formal engagement with a company.

Why? There are a number of reasons that include...

1. Your idea is not unique. What's unique is the 10,000 decisions you will make to execute your idea between now and success and beyond

2. Even if people have the exact same idea, there are likely many, many ways to execute the idea producing many different kinds of companies each with a different niche/focus/go-to-market etc. Again, here, the execution is what matters.

3. Rather than people stealing your idea, it's more likely that you need to drag them kicking and screaming to it. The best people are too busy doing their own things to be going around taking other people's ideas.

4. Since I meet with a lot of companies in my role as investor and advisor, it's likely I've heard versions of your idea before and I'll hear many more versions in the future. If I choose to engage with these companies I could be accused of sharing your idea which - in fact - did not happen. This exposes me to unnecessary risk

5. It adds paperwork and friction to everything

6. It filters out Founders/companies that don't know what they're doing and refuse to be coached.

That being said, I will, of course, always act in a professional manner and treat the information I get as confidential and use it only in the best interests of the founders and the company.

Also, my formal engagement contract does have a confidentiality clause since, in those cases, I will be digging much deeper into execution details.

Your primary job working at a startup might surprise you.

• It is not to write code

• It is not to design beautiful pixels

• It is not to meet the needs of that strategic customer

• It is not to make revenue

• It is not to have a big launch

• It is not to raise capital

It is to ship products that a large and growing cohort of users love, use, and recommend.

That’s it.

Everything else is either a means to an end or an organic byproduct.

As a result, your “vision”, your “job”, your ego, your personal preferences, or even the contractual obligations of your biggest customer don’t ultimately matter.

Collaborate hard. Disagree. Commit. Put it in the world. Learn. Iterate. Create value. Win or lose.

In B2B Sales contract negotiation hell?

In B2B Sales contract negotiation hell?

Build such a powerful, delightful consumer-facing product with a simple onboarding experience and then ask them "did you red-line the Instagram contract before creating your brand page?"

Modern brands are more human

The modern era of digital products and businesses has moved away from grand, bureaucratic brands and experiences, and towards delightfully human and simple customer journeys that speak to us as individuals.

Think Lemonaid for insurance. Slack for collaboration.

No Latin. No acronyms. Fewer forms. Less jargon. Less pain.

This is one of the secrets of disruptive tech companies. It's not just about an app. It's about a more human, user-centric business model and customer experience.

MVP, MVP, MVP. Everything's an MVP.

MVP, MVP, MVP. Everything's an MVP.

An MVP is a design requirement. It is not the thing you release.

You release v1, v1.1, v1.2

The "MVP" you release is the start of a journey - not the end.

What is your strategy for turning your MINIMAL VIABLE PRODUCT into a WORLD CLASS PRODUCT?

Maybe let's coin a new term... WCP.

Don’t let pressure demoralize you.

Don’t let pressure demoralize you. Use it to focus you and elevate the quality of your execution. Crunch time is time to deliver, not time to fold.

You don’t need product owners.

You don’t need product owners.

Product managers own and run products.

You don’t need BAs.

Product managers triangulate an understanding of the requirements of the business and the market to make product decisions.

All these extra roles come from bigcos and only serve to add unnecessary communication overhead and dilute accountability.

Product managers: own and run your product. Don’t let others take pieces of the responsibility and accountability off your plate.

If you need help communicating with internal and external stakeholders, lean on your product marketing manager. If you need help with understanding the requirements of your customers then go talk to them directly and/or lean on designers, design researchers and customer support teams.

How do you increase the quality of your team and execution?

• Equity: Give them a piece of the pie

• Inspiration: Inspire action through the tone of your voice and the clarity of your vision

• Leadership by example: You and your leadership team need to act as you want your team to act. Don't boss people around from the sidelines.

• Cultural Values: Ensure your cultural values celebrate efficiency, effectiveness, fast-forwarding to the future, truth-seeking, etc.

• Performance Reviews and other tools: Ensure your cultural values are embedded in your performance rubrics, hiring evaluations etc. Hold people to account to the values on a day-to-day and quarter-by-quarter basis.

• Bar raisers: Ensure that interview loops have someone outside the hiring team looking that evaluate candidates from the point of view of cultural values and raise the bar on the average quality of the existing people on the team.

• AAA players want to work with AAA players: Once you have great people acting in great ways it will get easier to hire great people.

• Autonomy, Responsibility, Authority: Retaining AAA people requires that you give them autonomy, responsibility, AND authority so that they feel like the CEO of their thing.

Leadership is about precision and room

One of the keys to leadership is being extremely precise in how you speak so that there’s no room for confusion, while also creating lots of room for your team to do their best work.

Careful about the granularity of your planning

One of the common issues I run into with startups I advise is a problem with abstraction layers/granularity of planning.

Plans that are either too high level (E.g. Take over the world in 3 years) or too low level (E.g. ticket 1, ticket 2).

Remember to develop and maintain a mid-level plan that acts as connective tissue between high-level goals and extremely tactical tasks. This plan should represent milestones of meaningful, new value delivered to the market (E.g. "Introducing New Feature X").

One of the biggest business mistakes: "Conflation"

One of the biggest mistakes I find in my advisory work is "Conflation".

Conflating one problem with another, one business model with another, one word with another, and so on.

What does Product-led mean?

Product-led means 2 things...

1. The product is the primary way that customers find and adopt the value of the business

2. The product team is leading the company. They develop a product strategy and take a leadership/influential role with other functions and processes.

I don't do one-off workshops. Why?

In my experience, the best way to help a company is to participate in the day-to-day decision-making and reviews of deliverables. To become a fractional part of the team.

Why?

Because while the first few meetings might involve some in-depth "workshop" style ideation, what happens after that is often as follows…

1. Realities on the ground change.

2. A million little implementation details need to be decided and the team will default to their muscle memory (i.e. their old way of doing things) or don’t know exactly what alternative implementations look like.

3. The above two things cause almost immediate strategy drift - meaning the strategic workshops result in no change.

Instead, I design my advisory work to be ongoing engagement with at least 1 weekly check-in. Often more.

During these check-ins, I help the team hold true to the initial strategy where necessary, implement the highest quality deliverables and navigate the nuances as the situation changes.

Stop talking to your engineers...

Stop talking to your engineers...

In software, almost nothing is that hard to build. It's only hard to build well and maintain over time. It's especially hard to turn it into a product. So pick wisely.

As a founder/ceo/sales team, stop asking your engineers "How hard would it be to...". If they're good engineers, their answer will almost always be "not that hard" - but it's the wrong answer.

Instead, ask your product team what it would take to develop new products. If they’re good Product Managers, their answer will almost always be "a lot".