R&D dysfunction typically comes down to people

Many of the dysfunctions I see in companies failing to build a high-performance R&D team can be boiled down to some combination of the following...

1. An engineering leader that is TOO opinionated and/or too concerned with technology

2. A product leader that is NOT opinionated enough and/or not sufficiently articulate about what they're trying to achieve and why

3. A senior leadership team that isn't listening to their engineering or product leaders or is failing to either a) hire better people or b) get them help in the form of coaches/advisors.

You need a CPO at a scaleup and bigco

It's essential to have a cross-functional group of experienced people with clear opinions in a decision-making process.

However, a group of well-meaning peers can't solve the problem alone.

It is also essential that there is a final decision maker who is empowered to...

1. Set vision

2. Create & maintain a consistent set of principles & decision-making patterns

3. Make executive decisions

4. Hold the team accountable

This is true for almost any process - but it's particularly true for Product Strategy and Product Management. This is typically a CPO who is empowered to lead the function at the most senior level.

Without this function in a scaleup and large company, decisions will be slow and less effective (often dramatically so).

#startups #scaleups #productstrategy #productmanagement #startupsnippets

Ideal product process

Canva recently released a new product process for their product org.

It is…

1. Vision (communicated by rough product designs)

2. Goals

3. Milestones (including design and user testing)

4. Build

5. Refine (sense check with internal team/founders… does it meet the quality bar, does it feel right)

6. Launch

I think it’s good but not ideal.

Here’s the process I like to use to build products that create step function change.

Strategy

1. Vision in roughly right, ambitious idealized design

2. Sense check with peers and leadership

3. Break into thin slices/milestones

Iterative/agile build (for each milestone)

1. Detailed design/requirements

2. Build/polish

3. Launch

4. Learn

5. Repeat

Without strategy, you get lost in incremental change. Without iterative/thin slices you get lost in development hell, disconnected from testing and market feedback for too long.

Marketing Automation malpractice

An absence of marketing automation is malpractice for any Product management/R&D process.

Every product release should include a Marketing Automation plan. This would include either the creation of new events or updates to existing events.

This also implies, of course, that Marketing Automation is not a MARKETING problem (despite the name). It's a product problem. It is a core part of the UX.

It can't be outsourced to the Marketing team or, worse, an agency.

Stop talking to your engineers!

Reminder number #42342 about maintaining a product-led culture…

At a scale-up or large company, sales, marketing, bizdev, CEO, etc should not be asking Engineering or Design to scope or build anything directly.

Scoping includes asking the question, "How hard would it be to...".

This is not a bureaucracy or control thing - it's an avoidance of chaos thing.

Design and Engineering do not have enough context to answer these questions or do this kind of ad-hoc work.

Because the question is not how hard it is to design or build something.

The question is IF we should build something, HOW we should build something (including handling edge cases, error cases, downstream implications etc), IN WHAT ORDER should we build something, and WHO will maintain it over time.

It's the job of Product Management to figure this out before it gets to Design and Engineering.

So sales, marketing, CEO-types - please talk to your friendly neighborhood PM.

Design & Engineering, please push back on these asks and loop in your PM to respond.

The Developer Platform Playbook: Canva Extend Case Study

I finally got a chance to watch the Canva extend developer platform event.

Link at the bottom of this post

Developer Platforms help you create defensibly for your business and elevate your product from a point solution to a critical part of the fabric of the Internet. It’s arguably the key reason companies and products like Facebook and the iPhone became as powerful as they are.

Based on their launch event, it is clear that Canva is running a near-perfect playbook for launching a new developer platform and ecosystem.

This includes...

• Deep buy-in from the business

• A deep understanding that “if you want to go far, go together.”

• Named and branded Developer program

• A HUGE focus on distribution and monetization for developers

• Meaningful innovation fund to supercharge the ecosystem + flywheel

• Standardized rails - no custom integrations

• Two clear modalities: a) In-app discovery, provisioning, and extensibility via “Apps” b) External connections via “Connect APIs”

• Easy to install and use SDKs with UI components and Sample Apps

• Strong opinions on design principles

• Awesome launch partners that clearly demonstrate key use cases

• A big-bang launch moment to incentivize and reward launch partners and kick-start the ecosystem + flywheel

• Developer advocates live on stage, showing code

• A long-term commitment (years)

This is the exact playbook I was running at Uber.

It's also the playbook I've helped companies execute as part of my advisory work.

In fact, the quote they cited, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together," was written on the wall where the Uber Developer Platform team sat.

This playbook is filled with counter-intuitive decisions and is often met with religious arguments (almost allergic organ rejection) by most people inside most companies. It takes a particular experience, mindset, and culture to truly understand the value of ecosystems, flywheels, and long-term thinking.

Massive Kudos to the team. I suspect Anwar Haneef had a lot to do with what happened on stage. I'm curious about who else was the driving force behind such pitch-perfect execution.

Watch Now

Have you found religion?

I spend a lot of my time explaining to traditional business thinkers, investors, and board members the benefits of a product-led strategy that is not corrupted by the pursuit of the wrong kind of short-term revenue and sales motions.

The reactions I get can generally be bucketed into three broad categories.

1. Skepticism and allergic reaction
   

2. Convinced and excited in the moment, but then they immediately revert to old habits when they have to make hard decisions.
   

3. Complete revelation and religious conversion.

It's most often the second.

It seems that some of the core tenants of the faith are...

1. Abundance thinking - to believe that the resources and techniques exist to succeed and scale (especially capital)
   

2. Conviction about the correctness, size and scale of the opportunity they've chosen to pursue - to avoid getting distracted by shiny objects along the way
   

3. Confidence in themselves and/or the team - to avoid paralysis and being crushed by the demands of great execution
   

4. Competence - to execute well and start seeing results

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

I am so passionate about helping earnest founders with a big vision achieve their goals.

Sometimes I jump on a first call with a founder who has a genuine heartfelt need to change the world for the better. For them, it's not about money or fame or any of the other trappings of traditional success.

I love these kind of founders.

But often, these founders are the ones who make the MOST mistakes in their early startup journey.

1. B2B when it should be B2C - Check

2. Franchise model - Check

3. Outsourcing the app to someone else - Check

4. Chasing validation from media, academia, government and/or incumbents - Check

5. Vague and ill-defined user problem - Check

6. Building a professional services business - Check

7. Starting in a small market - Check

On and on...

When I encounter these founders, I try very, very hard to gently but clearly and firmly redirect their energy back to the most effective path to success.

It's so important to me that all of this passion, enthusiasm, and potential isn't wasted by accidentally hitting these well-known landmines that are easily avoided.

This is why I do what I do...

If you're working on a social impact project or startup, please work with colleagues and advisors with deep experience in commercial success. While their motivations might be different, their insights into building things that engage users and scale fast are many of the same skills you need to make a social impact on the world. 

The map is not the terrain

Regular Reminder: Data is not the real world.

Staring at your Data to make decisions is like staring at the GPS navigation system to drive your car.

If your entire world was that little GPS navigation screen, you'd think the world was a 2D cartoon with no cars or children on the road.

Similariy, Data can tell you what users are doing right now - but this is just a fraction of the bigger picture. What users are currently doing is a function of their current understanding and your current product UX.

Lift your gaze, look out the windscreen! There is a real-world informed by intuition, best practices, intention, common sense, and more.

Be data-informed. Not data-driven.

When is it time to retreat and scale back?

I’ve noticed many founders retreat when they should advance and advance when they should retreat.

Big off-strategy B2B deal that will derail the company? They advance headfirst!

Running out of money? They retreat - becoming more conservative and cutting important people - instead of advancing with a more aggressive focus on their key metrics and launching into an effective process of raising capital against a big vision.

#founders #startups #startupsnippets #scaleups #fundraising #focus

Causes and cases of misalignment can often be subtle and insidious.

Causes and cases of misalignment can often be subtle and insidious.

It happens slowly, with small compromises and misallocations of focus and time.

Like a frog in boiling water, you will be cooked before you even know it.

Pay close attention to the temperature!

Speed vs. Velocity

Increasing velocity in the wrong direction does not accelerate your path to success. It delays it.

You can't execute effectively absent good strategy.

Ensure you have brilliant thought partners to help you to set strategy and avoid landmines and dead-ends or you will quickly find yourself running quickly - in circles.

#startupsnippets #startupsuccess #startups #scale #leadership #strategy

The line between a thin, agile product iteration and a bad compromise

The line between a thin, agile product iteration and a bad compromise is hard to see and easy to screw up.

You want to avoid making compromises that set you off down the wrong path.

Equally important, avoid making compromises that actually and ultimately end up being just as hard/costly as doing it right. When measuring cost, be sure to factor in initial customer education, ongoing customer support, technical debt, and, perhaps most insidiously, future investments and cognitive drift going in the wrong direction to support the initial compromise.

Ship polished iterations that are along the correct vector towards your ideal - even if, at first, it feels like slightly more scope.

How do you feel confident when asking for big money from investors?

1. Know your value

If you have a real product that solves real problems for real users and it has growth and retention - you are already incredible.

Believe in yourself and the value of what you've created.

Even if you don't have the above, understand the value of what you've derisked in your startup and feel confident it's worth what it's worth at that given stage.

2. Know the value of other things

Remember, this is not a bank loan. It's not about how much you can afford. It's about how much your company needs to win its category. They are not lending you the money; they are BUYING part of your company.

Remember that the money you think is BIG money is NOT that big. There is basically infinite money in the world. It needs to find a home. Billionaires and millionaires spend millions in holding costs for their Yachts each year. They park money in fancy homes because they have nothing else to spend it on.

Many VC funds have 10s and 100s of millions of dollars under management. They need to deploy big cash to just a handful of companies. That's their JOB.

More than any of that - they want to fund companies to WIN. You need to ask for a credible amount to get to the next major milestone in your company. If you ask for too little, you are undermining your case - not helping it.

Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive on Focus

This is such a beautiful compilation of Johnny Ive's comments about Steve jobs.

This is my favorite part...

"This sounds really simplistic, but it still shocks me how few people actually practice this. And it’s a struggle to practice. It’s this issue of focus.

Steve was the most remarkably focused person I’ve ever met in my life.

The thing with focus is it’s not this thing you sort of aspire to, or you decide on Monday, 'You know what, on Monday, I’m going to be focused.'

It’s every minute. 'Why are we talking about this? THIS is what we’re working on'

You can achieve so much when you truly focus.

One of the things that Steve would say was, ‘How many things have you said NO to?’

What focus means is saying no to something that with every bone in your body that you think is a phenomenal idea, but you say no to it because you’re focusing on something else."

The next episode of The Startup Podcast is about exactly this topic. Watch the video below and check out the latest episode dropping soon titled "Saying NO!" at www.tsp.show

So many founders (and operators) get this so, so wrong.

What happens between customer requests and implementation?

What happens between customer requests and implementation?

EVERYTHING

Typically it goes like this...

Find a Customer -> Sales Process -> Customer request -> Design/Scoping -> Agreement in principle -> Contract -> Signature -> Build

That's a road to disaster for building a product-led Silicon Valley-style startup.

It should look like this...

Define your ideal customer -> Find ideal Customers -> Sales Process -> Customer Request -> Product Strategy Discussion -> Fork in the road

1. Path 1: If it's on the *near term* roadmap and on the *short-term* strategy then:

Generalization -> Design/Scoping -> Agreement in principle -> Contract -> Signature -> Build

2. Path 2: If it's NOT on the *near-term* roadmap and/or on the *short-term* strategy, then:

Develop a generalized, thoughtful, and complete formal pushback -> Push back on the customer -> Win or lose the deal, but don't distract your business.

This process should go down path 2 80% of the time (if not more).

Someone has to say NO.

No amount of planning, no amount of strategizing, no amount of consensus building, and no amount of discussion will eliminate thrash, indecision, and distraction until some group of people are also willing to say NO.

No! To constantly changing priorities.

No! To constantly piling on more goals.

No! To focusing on the wrong KPIs.

No! To customer demands that are off-strategy.

No!

In these cases, your job (wherever you are in the org chart) is not to be congenial - but rather, it is to (respectfully, thoughtfully, but DEFINITVELY) put your foot down for the benefit of your colleagues and the overall company.

Is it time to hedge your bets?

The most costly thing you can do as a startup founder is use your R&D team to hedge your bets.

Once you have product/market fit, your job is to hit the accelerator and execute as fast as possible toward escape velocity on your core product and business.

Figure out what your key performance indicators are, grow them (exponentially) and raise capital against your story.

Building products and features to support secondary businesses will just slow you down and reduce your chances of success.

6 Reasons why your startup might be failing to achieve hockey-stick growth…

1. Lack of product leadership

Without strong product leadership, sales, marketing, engineering, and even the CEO can’t do their job.

2. Lack of prioritization and slicing

If everything’s a priority, then nothing’s a priority. The question is how to make disciplined choices and thinly slice releases so that the right things get done in the right order.

3. Lack of bottom-up adoption

If the only way to use your product is to talk to the sales team, you’ve already lost. Companies are made up of many individual consumers. Do you know how to empower them to adopt and advocate for your product?

4. Helping instead of disrupting your customers

Are you selling to the wrong customer? Often young startups sell to the companies they should, in fact, be killing. How can you avoid propping up incumbents and win the market?

5. Lack of conviction and urgency

Is indecision, lack of focus, and/or poor accountability costing you speed and efficiency? Who’s job is it to fix it? Have you factored in opportunity cost?

6. Understanding the proper role of sales

Is the sales team selling what you’ve built - or just selling whatever they can sell? Do they understand how to expand self-adopt accounts? Do they know how to minimize thrash in the R&D team?

Bet on the come

When figuring out a strategy, it’s easy to get caught up in externalities that confuse and derail the planning process.

What if we don’t raise capital? What if conditions change? What if that big deal doesn’t happen?

The trick is to develop a plan that makes reasonable (or even bullish) assumptions about the outcome of those externalities.

You WILL raise that capital. The conditions will ALWAYS change. The big deal WILL happen (or another one like it).

Worst case scenario, your assumptions prove to be wrong and you can recalculate.

But if you’re constantly compromising your strategy and getting hung up on externalities - you will never unblock your team and drive toward successful outcomes.

The other key trick: execute so well that your bullish assumptions come true. Make. Them. Happen.

Run an excellent fundraising progress that blows investors out of the water (your incredible plan will help!), monitor conditions closely and build in feedback loops, do everything you can to close that big deal (or, better, find a path that doesn’t rely on single big deals).