It just requires a little bit of...
Empathy
Common sense
Oh and a little bit of...
Taste
Design skills
Technical understanding
Project management
Leadership and consensus building
Diplomacy
Pattern matching
Data analysis
Vision
Pragmatism
Attention to detail
Long term discipline
Experience
Passion
Curiosity/truth-seeking
But that’s about it...
Internal stakeholder updates can make all the difference between alignment and chaos.
Be sure that your investor update emails (and internal stakeholder updates of all kinds in fact) start with clear charts to show key KPIs and include Highlights, Lowlights and What's next.
Ensure each section is concisely written with bullet points that contain key facts and implications without too much fluff.
Be sure to be real so that your stakeholders can help you when possible and aren't blind sided if things go off the rails.
If you have too much on your plate (fires, bug fixes, feature requests) to find the time to do 2019 strategic planning while your hemorrhaging capital, then the ONLY thing you have time for is strategic planning for 2019.
Planning is not a distraction, a nice to have, or a way to find MORE to do. It's a way to find FEWER more FOCUSED and more ESSENTIAL things so that your time is better spent and your outcomes are maximised.
If no one is buying your product, it doesn't matter how smart/sophisticated it is. You must solve the top of the funnel first. You MUST figure out how to make something simple to understand and use that people will self-adopt.
Last week I spoke to a startup with some great cultural values. I got their permission to share them - so here they are!
Initiative but not a lone wolf
Urgency but not rushed
Fun but not unprofessional
Scientific but not heartless
If you have a great term sheet on the table, take it.
Pricing strategy is a very interesting game of psychology, unit economics and gamification.
In two sided marketplaces it gets even more interesting. There are so many counter-intuitive ways to get creative to drive the kind of demand and supply side behavior you want.
It’s a cliché these days to say people are the most important part of any company. But it’s absolutely true.
Hiring strong people, particularly product managers, is a real art.
Prior to my experience at Uber, I considered myself pretty poor at interviewing and recruiting candidates.
However, seeing how Uber does it up close, and going through many, many, many interviews as part of the hypergrowth the company was experiencing, really gave me new insights into how to do it well.
One of my favorite compliments I received after leaving Uber was how effective a team builder I was.
Even though people can really make or break a company’s success, I find that most startups really don’t know how to recruit for key roles. So these days I’m increasingly helping the startups I work with think through how to describe their job requirements, find and reach out to candidates, and build interview loops that really test for a great fit with the company’s needs.
It’s so rewarding finding amazing people to supercharge the dreams of founders.
Startups are a sprint in the short term and a marathon in the long term. Very hard to balance.
Product is about nuance across multiple dimensions - context, intent, markets, personalities and more.
As someone who started out as an engineer, I’ve made the mistake of forgetting this over and over in my career.
As a (good) Engineer, you want to generalize things as much as possible. You want to look for common patterns and implement as few entities and workflows as possible.
An asset is an asset, right?
Wrong.
As a Product Manager you need to understand the difference between Persona A and B, Use Case A and B, Intent A and B etc. they can and should be very, very different.
Word choice, framing, UX metaphors etc should all radically change even while the underlying entities might remain the same.
The goal is not maximum system elegance/rationalization but, rather, maximum user understanding/alignment with their existing mental models and needs.
The worst sound you can hear from your team is silence.
As a product manager if you can avoid inventing something new to solve a problem, you've achieved something great.
Does it feel like you’re not shipping great features at a regular cadence? You likely have a product management problem.
In the early days of a b2c startup, doing bizdev activity for b2b2c distribution can feel so fun and gratifying.
It can feel like high-momentum, effective work that allows you to lock down glossy brands and partnerships who might get you big batches of users through the door. It also feels great to announce them to friends, family, media etc.
Often times, though, the reality is much, much different. Why? Because...
They often move very, very slowly.
They demand new features and behaviors that are tangential or orthogonal to your core product and business strategy.
They change their mind mid-stream
If you eventually get to ship the partnership/co-marketing program the results/conversion are often much, much smaller than you expect
If the results are marginal (which they almost always are at the beginning), your partner will often give up quickly and not put in the effort to optimise
For all these reasons, and many more, bizdev partnerships for a b2c app is really something to push off for later as a long-term bet and moat.
Instead, there's an axiom that says "Sell your own product'
Often times this feels like a harder, more data driven grind. However if you crack it (and you need to crack it!), it's high-scale, repeatable and has a huge, huge upside. It also forces you to really polish your product so that the user acquisition and retention really works.
You raise capital to trade money for speed & effective execution.
Executing a series of day-to-day tactical necessities without a strong product vision can only get you so far. At best it produces a confused and ineffective user experience. At worst it causes your team to spin their wheels, never quite shipping anything meaningful or polished.
So many startups need to stop inventing tech and instead start building product. Others need to stop building product and start selling product.
An interesting phenomena I’ve noticed when advising startups is the shallow understanding of what MVP means. Almost everybody uses the term now, but few understand how to successfully operationalize it.
It’s often difficult to determine exactly what the MVP is. It’s partly science and it’s partly art. The answer often requires a mix of experience and taste.
Often, after building the MVP, they continue to build more and more product without going deep on user acquisition and feedback.
Sometimes they build multiple MVPs of multiple major product areas leaving much of the product surface area in a largely broken state.
Remember, the purpose of an MVP is to get it into customer’s hands and learn and grow with your shared understanding. You need to continue to iterate and polish it until you can see your own face in the reflection.
Remember it’s “ship and iterate”, not “Build, build, build”. Shipping doesn’t mean just putting it on production. It also means putting it into customer’s hands at as much scale as possible.
Founders sometimes ask me if some piece of conventional wisdom they've heard or the advice that I'm giving is "necessary" or "mandatory".
I always try to explain that almost all of the tactics and advice I'm sharing can only increase the probabilities of success. It can't guarantee it. There's also always a chance you can succeed without following any given piece of "best practice" advice.
That being said, if you start bending or breaking too many of these guidelines you really start to diminish your chances of success.
Funny enough, many of the lessons I share day-to-day were not learned from a book or from someone else giving me the advice - I had to learn them the hard way by ignoring the advice in the first place (thinking I had a better way) and finding out I was wrong.
When dealing with conflicts or things that don’t go the way you wanted
Take maximum responsibility
Go out of your way to communicate as clearly as possible - your original intentions, current feelings and hopes for how to move forward
Think deeply about how you can mitigate the situation happening again