If you find yourself trying to convince a prospective customer of something in your sales pitch, then you might have 1 or more of the following things going on...
1. Wrong product
2. Wrong prospect
3. Wrong pitch
In relation to the pitch: Try to find a way to frame what you do in the context of a tactical and urgent problem. Make points that are irrefutable.
First a reminder: The goal of a product-lead, high-growth startup is not to fully serve the needs of an individual customer. It is to build a product that can scale quickly by serving the needs of a broader market. Products like this are focused, polished, easy to understand, easy to use, and require minimal support from customer service. Read more here.
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I see a lot of inexperienced b2b product managers who actually perform the function of project managers or account managers.
They spend most of their time triaging high-priority contractual obligations from customers (as negotiated by the sales team) into a jam-packed roadmap.
The sales team are amazing collaborators who should be deeply involved in the product ideation & road-mapping process.
They should not, however, be in a position to dictate features or product direction based on the needs of one or two customers.
Why?
Because sales teams represent an inherent dichotomy for product managers.
On one hand, they have an intimate understanding of what customers are asking for. On the other hand, they are often ill-equipped to understand the full product and prioritization implications of those asks.
This means that they are a strong source of customer feedback and market insights. But they are also a common cause of roadmap thrash and strategic drift.
Creating a strong, healthy, and productive relationship with sales demands a disciplined and effective product management process.
This requires experienced product managers to...
Help the company get very, very focused on what problems it's solving and how. This might mean narrowing everything from the buyer persona, the target verticals, the geography, and even the specific use-cases.
Have a healthy level of disregard for the needs of a single customer, and, instead, focus on what the business and the broader market really needs. For example, the business model may call for a b2c product strategy while specific customers might push for more b2b SaaS style features like white-label. A specific customer might want the product to solve their adjacent business problems, but the product strategy might require that the roadmap remain focused on a specific category of features and problems.
Craft a clear and reasoned roadmap that allows their sales partners to understand the near-term, mid-term, and long-term evolution of the product. The roadmap should be described in user-experience and/or business value terms. Once a good roadmap is created, a lower-fidelity, near-term version might also be used as an alignment and communication tool with customers.
Heavily invest in sales enablement: Help develop the decks, docs, and narratives that the sales team uses in the field to sell the product that they're actually building.
Inspire the sales team with all the use-cases and business benefits that the current product and product roadmap can unlock for their customers. Encourage them to build a pipeline of customers for the product, vs a pipeline of product asks for their customers.
Carefully manage "can't we just..." and "isn't it easy to..." style conversations. Remain disciplined and help the company understand the true complexity of building and maintaining each new feature. Every addition to the product takes time and sustained investment.
I see a lot of inexperienced product people who have done a lot of work to figure out the next best thing to do with their product to meet the needs of the business and customers - only to be deflected by limitations presented by the engineering team.
The engineering team are amazing collaborators who should be deeply involved in the product Ideation & scoping process.
They should not, however, be in a position to deflect or distract you from your carefully prioritized set of features & requirements.
Why?
Because many engineers & engineering teams have an inherent dichotomy.
On one hand, they are typically skeptical, conservative & reticent to make big, risky bets. Often with good reason.
On the other hand, they are magical wizards. Once challenged to make something difficult, they will typically ultimately figure out a way to make it happen.
This requires product managers to...
Have a healthy level of disregard for the constraints inherent in the technical details and focus on what the business and customers really need.
Come up with a roadmap that allows their engineering partners to chip away at the problem towards their original intended goal within the technical constraints (vs heading off in a different direction)
Have faith that their engineering partners can make it happen given enough time and support.
Inspire their engineering partners to rise to the occasion.
As someone who's run both an egalitarian non-profit and been involved in a highly-effective corporate:
Egalitarian non-profits often struggle to achieve their goals because...
1) The profit motive is an enormously useful tool to focus efforts and determine if given actions are effective or ineffective. When you deliver a product or service that people pay for you know you've created real value. Money is value exchanged for value.
2) Egalitarianism doesn't work when you're trying to deliver disruptive change in the form of products and services. Hierarchy is required to make decisions, make tradeoffs, hold people accountable, and more.
Too many product managers in b2b are actually project managers and account managers.
They spend most of their time triaging high priority contractual obligation’s from customers into a jam packed roadmap rather than developing a strong strategy Based on broad market needs, trends, best practices and intuition.
#consultingconvos
Life is like a treadmilll. If you’re taking “one step at a time” at a slow pace you’re basically going backwards.
Said more literally: The universe trends towards entropy (chaos). So if you want to impose any kind of order (I.e create something new) you must move at a speed that outpaces the natural rate of decay.
The road to product hell is pathed with "It's already on the roadmap", "it's on strategy", "it's a quick win"
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 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 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 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.
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 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
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.
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.
Mature startups and Enterprises: sometimes the company you need to disrupt is your own. #consultingconvos
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
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.
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.
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.
