This Fall, Madrona hosted a Product Leaders Summit that brought together over 80 seasoned product leaders from portfolio companies as well as Microsoft, Amazon, Stripe, and MagicLeap. Here are five learnings from the event.
Great products are the ethos of any successful company. And for that reason, product leaders are ultimately responsible for the success or failure of a product and, by extension, the company itself. That impact cannot be underestimated. But all too often, founders get wrapped up in the many other important aspects of launching a company. Without a product leader in the early days of a startup, the company loses its hyper-focus on building products that delight customers and that customers will actually use. To keep a startup on track, it needs someone who lives and breathes the product, can remain hyper-focused on the customer journey, can prioritize ruthlessly, and can build long-term product flywheels.
Hire a Product Manager Early
When launching a startup, hiring a product manager should happen earlier than many founders often assume. This person takes on the responsibility of executing the founder’s product vision, setting a clear product roadmap, and prioritizing ruthlessly. This frees the founder to work on other aspects of the business, such as fundraising, hiring, and growth.
The first product hire should have domain knowledge and diverse experiences and skills that allow them to take on many different roles in the organization. Product management roles are constantly evolving, but a few essential skills discussed during the Summit include:
- Communication — A product manager must clearly articulate the product vision and rally stakeholders around it.
- Analytical — When available, the product manager should lean on quantitative and qualitative data to inform prioritization decisions.
- Organized — A product manager needs to be well-organized and detail-oriented to keep everyone on track to hit targets.
- Curious — A product manager should constantly learn and keep up with industry trends.
Step into Your Customer’s Shoes
To create a great product, it is essential to understand intimately how your customers are experiencing it. The ultimate goal of product development is to solve the problem that your customers care about and, ideally, also to delight them in the process. But it is all too easy to get caught up in the development details and lose sight of that goal, especially when building enterprise products. Often, as the product manager for enterprise software, you are solving problems you’ve never personally had to solve. And yet, you must become that customer’s voice and effectively champion their needs throughout the product development process. So how do you do that?
Oliver Sharp, Highspot’s Chief Solution Architect, had an answer during the Summit’s Modern Project Management panel: “Be the customer.” When you get your first customers, sit with them and go through the entire process step by step. If something is painful because you haven’t built the right admin UI and automation, do it for them. If something is difficult to configure, you do it. When you are done, you will go back to the product development process with a deep understanding of what needs to be done, and “you will take it personally.” Because it was so painful, you will make it better, Oliver explained.
“For our first enterprise customer, I logged into their domain 600 times during the deployment process. And then, very quickly, we invested in the product features that we needed to scale to global deployments. There is no substitute for hundreds of hours of painful experience working directly with your product to solve real problems with customers,” Oliver said during the panel. “People don’t do that enough. They don’t take off the white gloves and put on the rubber gloves, getting in there and suffering what the customer is suffering, so they can make it better from a place of knowledge.”
Go Beyond the Product
While all product managers should use the product, it is equally important to understand the entire customer journey when making decisions about the product. A great product alone is rarely enough. Every customer touchpoint is an opportunity to make a positive impression and create a lasting relationship — particularly with product-led growth businesses. The best way to ensure customers adopt the product is to ensure they have a positive experience throughout their entire workflow. Product leaders should focus on time to value, building community, and clearly articulating their value proposition.
The age-old practice of building, testing, and releasing products that the team thinks will be good for users needs to change, Statsig CEO Vijaye Raji explained. Vijaye felt so strongly about the need for learning to come before shipping product that he left his career at Facebook to build Statsig, which is a modern product experimentation platform. Conveying the merits of experimentation to users is critical to the product’s success.
“Sometimes the product that you build is not good for people, and you need to have the humility to accept that,” Vijaye said during the Trends and Best Practices to Build and Scale a Product Team panel at the Summit. “You need to not take it personally, be able to shut it down and move on to another idea, and go build it.”
Prioritize Ruthlessly
With an uncertain macroeconomic climate ahead, it is more important now than ever to be strategic about what you are building and understand why. Product leaders must be clear on company goals and priorities and ensure that every decision aligns with those goals. Every dollar spent and hour invested should contribute to the overall strategy. Product leaders are asking themselves: What are the most important things that need to be achieved? What are the must-haves? And what can wait until next quarter or next year?
The goal is to create products that customers want and need and to do so in a way that is efficient and effective. By prioritizing the essential tasks, product managers can ensure they make the most impactful decisions for their companies.
Build “Flywheels” for the Long Term
The best products kick-start flywheels that improve themselves over time. A flywheel is a concept from physics that refers to a heavy wheel that’s difficult to get moving, but once it’s moving, it is hard to stop. In business, a flywheel is a strategy you can use to build momentum over time. It’s a way to compound your efforts and create a virtuous cycle that builds on itself.
Customer feedback loops are the most important flywheels for product leaders. Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain calls this the Product Flywheel. Product managers should put themselves in their customers’ shoes, identify “hair on fire” problems, develop solutions for those problems, incorporate those solutions into the product, and repeat. Through multiple iterations, the product improves, and customers become more attached.
Madrona’s Product Leaders Summit Product provided a wealth of practical advice for those in attendance. For those unable to attend, consider these five topics to help your early startup thrive. As product managers continue to play an increasingly important role in organizations, events like this will become more critical for sharing best practices and helping product leaders learn from each other. If you’re a product manager and would like to learn more, engage with this community, or be invited to future events, get in touch at: [email protected].
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