The details matter. Getting them right can be the difference between conveying a subconscious sense of credibility - or not. Pay attention to pixels, colors, margins, voice and all the things that "don't matter"
Product & Startup Builder
Filtering by Category: Product
Your product experience should be obvious and easy to use
A good product shouldn't require a training manual or even that much text to be initially useful to a user.
The trick is to have clean and clear UI/UX metaphors that seem obvious, great "clean slate" experiences that nudge the user to do key things when they first log in and in-line tips for what to do next (just 1 or 2 sentences at most). In this way, users learn how to use the software organically.
Tips, tricks, help and knowledge base should only be available for some advanced functions or to handle edge cases.
What are some of the best examples of this you've seen in the wild?
Software Doesn’t Sell Itself
You need a strong Product Marketing, BizDev and Sales org to drive demand. You need to have them coordinate and be lead (via influence) by Product (not the other way around).
Product Strategy Is a Combination Of These 3 things
Often times product strategy is a combination of experience (knowing how apps typically solve a UI/UX problem - i.e industry best practices), good taste (having good judgment about what looks good and what doesn't), and empathy (having strong intuition about how and why given users might behave or react to certain things). Data and research can then be used to interrogate these instincts.
The Goal Is To Win The "Best Business Award"
The goal is not to win the “best technology” award. The goal is to win the “best business” award.
More often than not, a more effective sales and marketing operation with a simpler/easier to use product will beat the most comprehensive/powerful technology.
If you’re struggling to build your business around technology that most people don’t understand or can’t digest then consider going back to a blank piece of paper and building something very simple that is easy to understand and adopt. Even if that thing is not necessarily new or novel. Then expand from there.
Let’s call this the “gateway drug strategy”
The Difference Between Tech And Product
Almost the moment you decide on a more specific user persona, additional, in-depth product insights and priorities emerge that help you truly specialize your offering for that market.
That's also the difference between Tech.
Tech can "do anything".
Product does very specific things for very specific users in very specific ways.
Design Discipline
Product design is so much fun!
Psychology + Art + Data/Science + Intuition + Invention
3 Key Product Mistakes To Avoid
Startups often make a number of key product mistakes over and over. Some that come to mind today...
1. Starting with too broad a "platform" trying to solve all categories/verticals/use-cases. E.g. "It could be anything!"
2. Starting with the wrong specific problem or niche vertical when there might be another niche that has more pain and money associated with it. E.g. Working to help gardeners get leads instead of helping lawyers (more money in the latter).
3. Starting with the wrong specific solution by not directly attacking the #1 sub-problem in the given market/use-case. E.g. Building a product to help lawyers write proposals when what they might actually need most is new business leads
4 Things You Need To Prove To Raise Capital & Have A Good Exit
If you're building & running a self-serve consumer app, you really only need to prove 4 things to raise capital and have a good exit
You can spend $x on acquiring a user and get $y in return. Where y is the Customer Life Time Value (LTV). It’s ok if Y is initially less than X (this is investing/subsidizing growth - see point 3).
The market your addressing is large enough such that your total revenue can become meaningfully large.
You have a clear and believable strategy to reduce the cost of X and increase the return of Y (This is essential if X is still greater than Y)
You have an IPO in your future and/or (more likely) you have a number of potential acquirers lined up - ideally you've started building relationships with them already.
You Need To Hire When...
Don't hire until you're absolutely ready to hire. Building a team to run an imaginary business just burns time and money.
You know you need someone to join your team when...
1. You, or someone on your team, is underwater and the tasks hitting the floor are holding the business back.
2. You don't have anyone on the team who is good enough to complete an essential and immediate task at the level of quality/effectiveness needed.
For example, don't hire a sales person unless you have a product to sell - and you've personally figured out how to sell it with the first few sales. Don't hire a growth marketer until you have a self-serve product ready to onboard and retain users. Don't hire a community manager until you have a product worth building a community around.
Noticing a trend? Build a PRODUCT that people want to use and is ready to scale before scaling your team.
What Does Being A Product Manager Mean?
Upon asking a colleague what being a product manager meant to him, he gave me one of the best answers I've heard.
P. R. D
Product managers will recognize that this acronym refers to an oft used tool of Product Management known as a Product Requirements Doc. It's the way that a PM shares the details/spec of the product that needs to be built with all key stakeholders (especially engineers).
In this context, though, he came up with:
Priorities
Requirements
Design
I love this. An elegant way of repurposing the acronym to neatly summarize what PMs should be focused on.
Product Management Isn’t That Hard.
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...
Product Is About Nuance Across Multiple Dimensions
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.
Sell Your Own Product!
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.
Are you Executing Daily Tactical Necessities Without A Strong Product Vision?
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...
So many startups need to stop inventing tech and instead start building product. Others need to stop building product and start selling product.
What does MVP Really Mean?
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.
On Revenue vs. Scale, Helping Incumbents vs. Disruption.
Revenue vs. Scale
One of the biggest challenges many young startups with global disruption ambitions face is an addiction to revenue.
In the early years, a startup’s job is to grow - fast - not to make revenue or profit.
This might sound counter-intuitive. So let me explain.
An undue focus on customer revenue forces you to pay too much attention to what your first paying customers ask you to do for them for fear of losing them (and your only source of cash). These are often feature requests that might be good for their business, but not necessarily good for yours.
Why? Because existing customers will typically ask for advanced features designed to solve more and more of their particular needs. These needs are often either very specific to the quirks of their operation or are very hard to polish and scale. Making things worse, the requests also tend to come thick-and-fast meaning that you end up developing a broad product surface area without taking the time to really polish everything that’s getting built.
Even with amazing product discipline (where you are translating each specific ask into carefully designed, future-proof and generic product capabilities), it’s very, very difficult to avoid falling into this trap when you are capital constrained and dependent on revenue. 9 times out of 10 it will ultimately be massively distracting, undermine your focus, create overstuffed products and stunt your business growth. It can, and often does, kill your company.
Instead, high-growth startups typically need to raise enough capital to invest in growth without being beholden to the needs of any particular customer or customer segment.
This typically means focusing on a number of key things. They include…
A focused product that initially does only 1 or 2 things really well
A clear marketing message delivered on a beautiful website
A polished self-serve onboarding funnel with standardized pricing
UI and UX that is simple and clear to understand for new users
Well oiled operations (sales, support, biz dev etc)
Referral and viral mechanics
With these features (and many others) you will hopefully be able to win and onboard many, many customers quickly.
Why is quantity better than quality? Because making software is relatively easy. The world is littered with small-scale software projects that were essentially custom-built for a few customers. That’s not building a high-growth startup. That’s building a small software business. The hardest thing in the world is getting broad (even monopolistic) adoption of a product by a whole category of users. It’s hard, therefore it’s valuable. Once you have that market position, you have a captive audience to which you can up-sell and cross-sell a range of new features (with attached fees & charges) over time.
Helping Incumbents vs. Disruption
Another important (and often overlooked) aspect of reducing your focus on revenue is that it allows you to consider disrupting rather than partnering with incumbents. It’s very easy to make the decision to run to big customers and partners to try to get big money and/or lots of distribution. However, oftentimes, a tech startup should be killing - not helping - some of the legacy players in an ecosystem. Or, at the very least, forcing them to play by new rules. This is the very definition of disruption.
To be even more concrete: Often times your first instinct will be to build some great b2b software for the existing players in a market where, perhaps, instead, you should be building a direct to consumer alternative to what’s gone before. A clear example of this is Uber. They didn’t build dispatch software for Taxi companies. They built a new kind of mobility business that dealt directly with riders and drivers - making Taxi companies obsolete. Had they tried the other thing, the story would have gone very, very differently.
Avoid Shipping The Org
When working on product marketing (how you will brand and merchandise your products on marketing materials like your website) you want to be sure to avoid “shipping the org” (i.e. describing things based on the way they were built by internal teams) or doing things for the sake of appearances (e.g. trying to show more products than you have).
You’re number one priority should be to think through the problems and use cases your customers have and describe your product in those terms as clearly and simply as possible.
Brand And Product Design Is Often Underestimated
Brand and product design can be such an important yet subtle aspect to your business success. It's easy to dismiss it as unimportant frosting on the cake, but investors, customers and partners can so often make split second decisions based on subconscious cues like pixel alignment and colors.