My personal notes for Improving Your Odds – Building Products from Startup

A talk by Chiara McPhee I attended at DeveloperWeek 2019
#business#startup#product

90% of new products fail commercially. This happens everywhere. Creating viable products is really hard.

Why do products fail? There are a few main reasons.

  • No market need: 42%
  • Ran out of cash: 29%
  • Team issues: 23%
  • Outcompeted: 19%

Chiara recommends a few steps to help mitigate this.

1. Listen to Your Customers

We have two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we speak. —Epictetus

One of the biggest issues Chiara sees with the old workflow is that feedback is filtered from the customer to the project manager to the designer and finally to the engineer. This filters and dilutes the feedback engineers receive, kind of like playing telephone.

In order to achieve true customer-centricity, everyone on the team should have access to customers (including engineers). This allows engineers to understand the pain and empathize with customers, which helps with motivation and improves the product quality.

Customers also love this. It helps you ship products they love and value.

Use a fake experience (fake doors) that people opt into to assess demand. SendGrid also has a platform where customers can submit ideas directly.

2. Ship It, Then Send It

Even the best people in the world struggle to create products. If you

  • Start with a steel thread: solves a small, discrete customer problem.
  • Get your steel thread in the hands of the customers ASAP.
  • Separate your product and marketing releases. This can go out much later than the first version of a product or feature.

Personal note: I need to do a much better job of understanding customer problems before deciding on a solution.

3. Measure & Iterate, Ad Infinitum

  • Measure your progress against clear metrics.
  • Make decisions with data Avoid HiPPOs (highest paid person's opinion).
  • Iterate towards an effective solution.
  • Paint a product vision, not a product roadmap. What you learn while you're iterating should change the developed features. A product vision is a series of guiding principles to influence where the product heads.

4. Invest in Your Team

Great companies heavily invest in culture and team. How we work together becomes more important than what we're working on.

  • Choose teammates with shared values
  • Build connective tissue
  • Keep your team small and nimble
  • Trust your teammates and hold them accountable

Autonomy without accountability is anarchy.

  1. Opportunity discovery JTBD interviews Understand point where somebody made a decision
  2. Synthesize interviews a list of common and try to identify key problems.