Your argument isn’t where you think it is

Whenever there’s endless debate, indecision and constant relitgation, it’s so so incredibly important to go upstream to examine (and make explicit) first principles, assumptions and use-cases/personas.

If done properly, many downstream disagreements dissolve away.

But it’s not enough to examine them - they must be documented into a compelling narrative and used to…

a) Onboard all new stakeholders

b) Remind and realign all stakeholders when (not if) debates reemerge.

#startups #scaleups #productmanagement #strategy #alignment #management

My Trick Interview Question when hiring PMs and CPOs

I often work closely with companies transitioning to or strengthening their culture to product-led principles and ways of working.

Typically, I help them understand the need for transition, its implications, and the very messy details of making the transition successfully.

Occasionally I also step in as the interim Chief Product Officer, preparing the ground for permanent hires.

An essential part of my job is to help build and refine the product org, which includes interviewing Product Managers, Senior PMs, and CPO candidates.

To test the level to which they've truly internalized the concept of product-led ways of working, I will regularly ask the following question:

"Enterprise sales and large partnerships can often create a lot of thrash for R&D teams. They often come with a diverse range of feature requests, demands, and even contractual obligations that can derail roadmaps. How do you think about minimizing or even mitigating this kind of thrash?"

Many fall back on a standard answer: Maintaining strong relationships, regularly meeting with sales, and proactively understanding customer needs to manage requests effectively.

This is a good answer.

But it's essentially wrong for a product-led company.

A good product leader at a product-led company does not MANAGE inbound requests from Sales and Partnerships - hoping to effectively build what's been sold in the most efficient and generalized way.

A good product leader at a product-led company CONTROLS inbound requests by ensuring that the Sales and Partnerships teams are selling the product they're actually building.

They ensure that sales and partnership activities align with the existing product strategy and roadmap, not the other way around. This involves defining the right customer and partner profiles, specifying specific use cases, crafting a forward-looking roadmap, and equipping the sales team to attract the right kind of clients for their current product, not hypothetical future versions.

It's rare for candidates to nail this perspective, but when they do, it's a strong indicator of their fit for a product-led company, especially for senior roles.

The two hardest problems

Engineers often joke that there are only two intractable problems in engineering…

1. Naming things

2. Off by one errors

If you know anything about engineering, you know that this isn’t far from the truth.

However, the truth is also that…

Oftentimes, half the battle for business and product leadership can be disambiguating and naming things well.

Names are very, very powerful.

Obviously, they are essential to creating easy symbolic handles that people can use to refer to complex concepts or objects quickly.

However, names, if used precisely, can be far more potent than that. They can also be used to…

1. Clarify the utility of a concept or entity

E.g. Movie Search Page

2. Clarify the distinguishing characteristics of the given concept or entity from other concepts or utilities (particularly those that could be confused or conflated together)

E.g. General Movie discovery vs Movie Search

3. Motivate and animate everyone toward a shared vision

E.g. Movie Search 2.0 - Featuring Next-Gen Ranking

4. Imply a namespace for adjacent concepts that fit together - helping to map the concept space

E.g. Movie Search, Movie Recommendations, Movie Rankings

5. Help drive important and implicit understanding in the problem domain

E.g. I never mentioned the company I'm referring to in the examples, but I bet you could guess which one would have such features/concepts in their product.

These few examples clearly show that naming things carefully can be a superpower for product and business leaders. It can be a key technique to accelerate everything from internal discussions, consensus building, and team alignment to external product marketing and sales.

What’s the secret to startup success?

The formula for a successful startup is relatively easy to describe but almost impossible to do.

1. Solve real problems for real people

2. Deliver it at massive scale

3. Find a way to do it profitably

In that order.

Remove anyone and anything that’s distracting you from this list or unable to contribute to it effectively.

Fine and hold onto anyone helping you execute the list more quickly and/or more effectively for dear life. Do whatever it takes to retain, motivate and align them.

The rest is noise.

My Product Decision-making Principles

Idealists are the ones who change the world.

Figure out the ideal and work backward. Don’t pre-compromise yourself before you even get started just because of perceived limitations of scope/time/cost. You can (and must) slice your ideal into thin slices and do the hard work of pushing back on constraints to get to where you're going in iterations.

Come for the tool, stay for the network.

It’s rare to build a marketplace/network/flywheel without first building a killer single-player experience that works on its own terms. Once you’ve cracked the code on single-player, adding a flywheel is almost mandatory. Find one.

Personas and priorities mitigate ocean boiling.

Everyone wants something different. You can’t make everyone happy, or you’ll just be boiling the ocean. The question is NOT “is this a good idea” or “is this a great opportunity” The question “is what do OUR users want” and “is this an opportunity to hit OUR north star metric”? We prioritize carefully in that context using either…

a) Bottleneck Prioritization: What is the #1 reason more people are not more successful more often with our product RIGHT NOW? (great for products with existing usage).

b) Yellow Brick Road Prioritization: What is the journey users are on and how do we ensure that it is as smooth as possible for as long as possible (leaning on sunk cost to keep them going) (Great for products that are new and incomplete).

Eat your vegetables.

As above - make the thing you have work before getting distracted by shiny objects and second or third-order innovation.

Nothing is free.

There’s no such thing as “just adding a checkbox” or “toggling on a new feature.” Every single thing you add to the product affects the journey, its overall story, customer support, tech debt, maintenance, etc. Every single thing must meet the standard of personas and priorities.

Ignore your engineers (and other constraints).

If Elon Musk can launch a rocket into space and have it flip onto its ass and land on a small platform in the middle of the ocean, your team can add that button to your SaaS product. First, figure out what you want (the ideal) before letting engineers (or anyone else) deflect and distract you with technical realities/scoping.

The customer is almost never right.

Users and customers don’t know what they want, and they don’t even know what’s possible. They certainly don’t know what you’re trying to build, and they may not even be the right kind of user or customer for you.

Stop asking them and stop listening to them. Triangulate the truth at the intersection of your strategy and the pain points of your overall target persona. Prioritize based on all of the above.

Alignment is traction.

Almost every decision has upstream and downstream effects on your product, customer journey, and team. Ensure that implications across all dimensions (e.g., ads, marketing, pricing, onboarding, product, offboarding, customer support, etc.) are considered and implemented in alignment.

The funnel is your friend.

Where are people dropping off, and why? Fix it.

Data is deceiving.

Survivorship bias, recency bias, interpretation errors, and other data-related biases can make data very distracting. The map is not the terrain. Set your destination, lift your eyes up from the GPS, and look at the road. Use common sense.

Related: Your OKRs are irrelevant if you’ve realized something else matters more to the business. Throw them out and re-write them mid-cycle if you have to.

Say NO more.

It feels surprisingly good, and it’s the only way to focus.

Say YES more.

Indecision and fear are killing you - bias toward action and get shit done.

A clear vision makes decisions WAY easier.

You don’t need to say NO so much if people (internal and external) already know what you’re doing and why. It also animates, motivates, and aligns all stakeholders when they’re making decisions.

God is in the details.

Pixels, words, mental models, precise product requirements, and more matter a LOT. WAY More than you’d imagine. Get them right. Be precise. Be intentional.

There are exceptions to every rule.

Wisdom is knowledge in context.

There’s a contradicting bit of advice for everything.

Knowing WHICH rules/advice/strategy to apply WHEN and WHY to break the rules is true wisdom.

You can’t learn this from podcasts, blog posts, books, or silly principles lists like this one :)

"Focus" doesn't mean what you think it means.

Often times when I talk to founders who think they are "focused" on "one thing" when what they've actually done is "Conflation".

Conflation, of course, is confusing multiple things together (customer personas, problems, messages).

What they've done, in this case, is to sweep all their unfocused activity under one "rug" or category to make it look tidy.

This just makes it more difficult to design a great product, develop great product marketing messages, and go to market effectively.

The exact OPPOSITE goals and outcomes of real focus.

Focus actually requires a clear and precise definition of things and pursuing each thing one at a time.

This is fairly common advice - but here's where it gets more interesting...

It is WAY better to have MULTIPLE narrowly defined focus areas than ONE focus area that is rooted in conflation.

So don't sweep your distractions under the rug.

Be honest about the nature and number of your precisely defined focus areas AND make an intentional choice to focus on one or more things at a time (if that's what you feel compelled to do).

Want to 10x your team's productivity?

You will be blown away by how...

1. Clear roles

2. Clear ways of working

3. Clear business context

4. Competent people (hiring better)

5. Competent management (better leaders and leadership principles)

6. Dedicated resources

Will RADICALLY improve the efficiency by which you deploy capital and the speed by which you make a real impact on the market.

Stop wasting time - do the hard work and spend the right money to improve your team structure and composition.

Doing any less is incompetence and malpractice of leadership.

Your inaction is killing your company!

Does your company spend countless hours, days, weeks, or even months debating topics?

Does building consensus between key stakeholders feel like pulling teeth?

Does consensus feel temporary and easily dissolve as soon as action is required or as some time passes?

Does it feel like there are just too many moving parts, complex interacting components, and not enough resources to go around?

Many of these things are rooted in fundamental problems like business strategic clarity, product strategy clarity, high-quality senior leadership, and more.

But it's also rooted in the absence of a key cultural trait - "Bias toward action."

Everyone at your company should feel a lots of discomfort if they're not "moving fast and breaking things".

This phrase has lost favor in recent years. People have come to see it as reckless. But that's nonsense. Most companies are the opposite of reckless - they are mired in indecision and angst. They need a good jolt, and they need to rebalance their behavior towards the "breaking things" end of the spectrum.

Does this resonate? Subscribe to my newsletter or reach out - we should talk. Links in the comments

What the heck is a "Chief Revenue Officer"?

I really struggle with teams and titles that involve outcomes vs. functions - especially in young/small companies.

For example. "Go to market", "Revenue" and "Innovation" teams

These are problematic for at least 3 reasons...

1. These kinds of outcomes should be everyone's responsibility everywhere across the company.

2. What they do is vague and can encompass all manner of "sins".

3. It's hard for the product team to engage with a big block/center of gravity known as "Revenue" instead of having direct levers to pull (this is particularly important in a product-led org where product managers need to have access to the levers of the company to make their product successful).

Instead, I prefer "Marketing" and "Sales" and "Product" teams. These are specific people with a specific function/culture.

These functions/capabilities come together to achieve go-to-market, revenue and innovation outcomes for the business.

Are you playing to win?

So many founders are just playing to survive.

So many investors are only willing to fund companies to subsistence levels.

My mother used to always say “Shoot for the stars and you will at least hit the tree tops”

Playing to survive means your vision is limited, your ability to raise capital is undermined, your likelihood to hire great people (who want to work on hard/big problems) is reduced and your probabilities for meaningful success are diminished.

#startups #scaleups #ambition #playtowin

Theory of change - incrementalism vs. ideals

Are you a bold instigator of change?

Broadly speaking, there are two theories of change.

Incremental and Ideal.

Incremental change suggests that you want to make small changes and corrections to find the right answer over time. It's typically associated with not wanting to "rock the boat" too much.

This is great when something is roughly working well, and you want to improve it carefully, consistently (but minimally) over time.

Ideal change suggests that you want to figure out a new medium-term ideal structure and work backward to create an efficient and pragmatic roadmap from here to there.

This is great when things are new, novel, or just not working as they are. It accelerates everything to a new normal.

Most people are too afraid to adopt the latter "ideal" approach when it's necessary. They typically prefer to deal with or instigate incremental change.

However, when important and fundamental things need changing, this is an ineffective, nightmarish process.

It leaves everyone stumbling around in the dark, slows the pace of essential change, minimizes the chances that each incremental adjustment will ladder up to the appropriate outcome, and is ultimately even more painful than just ripping off the bandaid.

One of the reasons for this is that - when it comes to incremental change - not only is the intended structure changing regularly, but so is the role that each part plays within that structure. Nothing is stable.

For example, if you're trying to re-org your company to a fundamentally new model, if you do it slowly, the org structure is changing, AND the roles and expectations of each of the people within that structure are changing. It's like quicksand. Everything is moving!

Instead, if you completely change the structure in one move, the only thing that keeps moving (improving) is people's understanding of their new role, their competency in that role, and the quality of overall execution within the new structure. Only one aspect of the org continues to evolve.

Be bold. Make important changes quickly and encourage everyone to catch up quickly.

Do you use budgets to micromanage your team?

As it relates to alignment and budget, great leadership and team dynamics looks like...

1. Giving your team a headcount and operational budget at the start of the cycle

2. Giving the company a clear business strategy at the start of the cycle

3. Reviewing each team strategy (in response to the business strategy)

4. Trusting them to execute using the budget/headcount however they see fit throughout the cycle

5. Reviewing their progress every 1-2 weeks + end of cycle

Bad leadership looks like...

1. Giving them a budget

2. Reviewing every spending decision to proxy-control and micromanage all their choices

The former empowers leaders at the edge to make appropriate decisions with maximum buy-in, responsibility, and accountability.

The latter slows everything down, creates perverse incentives & outcomes, and demoralizes your best people.

Hire great people, trust them, and hold them accountable for their outcomes.

#startups #scaleups #startupsnippets #consultingconvos #management #leadership

What does marketing do in a product-led org?

Marketing is...

- The voice of customer/market into the business

- The voice of the business out to the customer/market

Marketing owns...

- Brand

- Market Research

- Channels (Events, Website, Mailing list, webinars etc)

- Production

- Marketing Operations

Marketing works with...

- Gets content and direction from Product Marketing Managers

- Provides generalized Sales and Partner enablement materials

They key is their relationship with Product Marketing.

While Marketing owns marketing channels and resources, product marketing are the ones living with the squads, doing product-specific research and creating product-specific marketing content.

They work with marketing to leverage their resources and channels to make their product successful.

The most evil phrase in product management

It never fails to surprise me just how much detail and intentionality it takes to design a polished version of even the most simple feature/change to a product.

This is why thin slices and a thoughtful design process are so essential.

This is also why "can't we just" is an evil phrase

Too many brands can work against you

Be careful about introducing too many brands into your business.

There's a real art to determining what a new product, initiative, or technology deserves a new brand and exactly what kind of brand to use.

Too few, and things can be conflated together and hard to reference quickly. Too many (or too poorly considered), and things can get overwrought and confusing.

Remember, there are Emotive, non-sensical, and descriptive brands.

Evocative examples include Slack or Zoom. They allude to the function of the app but don't describe it literally.

Nonsensical examples include Kodak and X. They don't mean anything until the company embuses the name with meaning.

Descriptive examples include Facebook and Instagram. They more literally describe what the business or product does.

The older I get, and the more noisy the world gets, the more I prefer descriptive names.

This is particularly true when speaking about subbrands. I'm a big fan of Subrands rather than making up whole new names for everything.

E.g., If your company is called Facebook, your messaging product would be called Facebook Messenger. If your company is called Google then your spreadsheet product would be called Google Sheets.

It helps you focus all your branding efforts on your core brand while launching a logical and easy-to-remember suite of sub-products that immediately make sense without explanation.

What are some of your favorite brand strategies and naming conventions?

Your startup's biggest distraction and risk

Your startup's biggest distraction and risk

The biggest distraction I encounter in fledgling startups is the question of monetization.

They have no product, no product-market fit, no competitive differentiation, no users, and/or no proven retention, and yet very "serious" and "important" people like boards, investors, and advisors are asking about "revenue".

Get a grip.

Unless you've proven that you can solve a real problem at scale, spending too much time talking about (or expecting!?) monetization/great unit economics is foolhardy.

Ignore the distracting people and focus on delivering value.

Your strategy is useless if...

Your strategy is useless if...

Coming up with a great strategy is pointless unless there is the recognition, appetite, and long-term discipline to realize that the strategy must be followed consistently - across the entire org and across a sufficient time horizon for it to play out properly.

Too many executives and orgs declare a strategy and then...

1. Fail to properly propagate the changes across the entire org

2. Quickly drift away or fully abandon the strategy as they start to execute and encounter difficulties or other shiny objects

#startups #scaleups #startupsnippets #consultingconvos #strategy #management

Make your product priceless

It's amazing what happens when you put domain dogma and monetization aside to think about end users.

All of a sudden, incredible, innovative, and disruptive features become obvious and urgent.

These features often have the potential to make your product indispensable and - by extension - priceless.

Finding a great Customer Support Rep

A great high-scale customer service rep; once asked, "How do you scale what you do?"

Should answer with the following key ideas...

• Tools (Ticket management etc)

• Playbooks (To drive consistency and improve quality over time)

• Knowledge-base articles (To mitigate tickets in the first place)

• Product Feedback/fixes (To eliminate product defects that cause confusion)

If they answer with ideas in the last category, they're a unicorn. Hire them immediately.

The real question

As a founder, the key question is: Do USERS love my PRODUCT

NOT: Do partners, customers, and investors love ME