The ultimate product management cheat sheet for startup CEOs
Congratulations! You and your small team have defied the critics, sketched out a revolutionary mobile app idea in your garage, and are on the way to winning a tasty chunk of seed funding. What’s next? Well it’s probably time to start (or accelerate) building and shipping that product, right? But there’s a small problem. You’re all from a technical or business background, and nobody on the team really has developed a product from scratch before. Mapping the product back to users? Considering customer segments? Organising marketing plans? Is there even anyone on your team to manage?
The top reason startups fail, according to research outfit CB Insights, is because their product has no market need. After that, getting blasted by the competition, poor product quality, ignoring customer needs, and mistimed launches are all common reasons why many startups are doomed. It’s no coincidence though that each of these factors could be considered the remit of a product manager. But fear not; just because you’re part of a tiny team, or can’t quite afford to hire a dedicated product manager just yet, doesn’t mean that you can’t benefit from a little “product thinking”. Time to become your very own product manager “lite” with this product management cheat sheet.
What is product management?
Let me simplify this to one sentence. Your job is to ship the right product to your users, in order to secure the success of the business. Let that roll around in your head for a minute, as I am going to ask you to repeat it later.
To succeed, a product manager needs not only to know what the right product is, based on your strategy — but also to be an all-rounder, constantly juggling the needs of the team, the business, stakeholders and investors, the product, and the users. That’s not as simple as it sounds. Without product management, all of these elements are left isolated and alone in chaos. You’ve got to pull it all together!
Your business can only become (or remain!) successful if your product is a winner, so you have to work to ensure that the product and the team behind it are working together as best they can. Getting this to happen means understanding the technology behind your product, which will not only help in supporting your team of developers or engineers, but will also help with communicating with other parts of your business, and investors. This understanding will also help you realize what goals or features are feasible and what are not.
In addition, you need to add a deep understand of your users and what problem you are solving for them. You need to know this even better than your team, and constantly help them map what you are asking them to do back to these users and problems. Added points if you can also place this in the competitive landscape of what everyone else is doing, and what alternatives your users have. I think it’s best if you know your competitors products — both their strengths and their weaknesses — better than your competitors themselves do. You will constantly be called on to defend what you are doing, and in this case knowledge is your best defense.
Process from chaos
Next up, a product manager has to help the team plan how they will ultimately create the product that’s going to be shipped. You need to create a repeatable way to ship product to customers, using the team and resources available. To do this, your process needs to be:
- iterative,
- delivering in shippable increments,
- measurable,
- transparent,
- communicative,
- continuously integrated, and
- introspective.
I know that’s a lot to think about, and too much for me to go into detail (you’re a CEO — I know what TL;DR means!). But keep those aspects in mind as you try to get your team into a regular working rhythm. When you’re under pressure to deliver, you should still never sacrifice shipping product to actual users quickly. This is important because it helps you get the feedback you need in order to determine if you are actually solving a real problem. Your customers’ needs, and their alternatives in the market, are constantly evolving, maybe even faster than your product is. Don’t miss the window of opportunity because you never ship to your actual customers! And this means that even if your strategy has changed, if you stand to learn something by shipping the current work in progress, DON’T interrupt the team before they ship it!
You’ve also got to represent the goals and visions of the business as a whole, which also means channeling that strategy into your team’s product backlog. Since you’re the CEO, I would expect that an intimate knowledge of the company’s strategy is something you can quote if I wake you at 4 AM at toy gun point. But remember that your team does not live and breathe this the way that you do. It’s your job to set and make sure your team understands the priorities and overall vision of the product, and it’s critical to impress onto your team that you are in fact using the delivery of product to your users in order to make decisions. Try asking questions to get them to rephrase what you have told them back to you; you might be surprised what they say!
To reiterate: never stop deepening your understanding of the customer base, so you can actually give them what they need. Nothing matters more than delivering a fantastic product to your users. Get the product into their hands, listen to what they say, and constantly deepen your understanding of their needs, using this understanding to refine your product backlog and motivate your team. Doing this using a repeatable process is the core of product management.
Be a communicator
The most important “job to be done” as a product manager, a job at which I’ve seen a lot of them fail, is to communicate. Proactively. Profusely. Continuously. Essentially, a product manager is a story teller and an interpreter, telling design, engineering, quality, and delivery teams what and why in words that they understand. In one direction, product management takes that chaos of building a product and turns it into a constant function for the product team, eliminating uncertainty and change over the short term, so they can keep their heads level and focus on delivering according to plan.
The same works in the other direction, too. The product manager has to take what is happening on the ground with the product team, simplify it, and communicate the essence to management and stakeholders. It’s all about saying: “Given the team that is working on this product, this is what we are going to deliver within this timeline” — and believing it, based on a repeatable process and a team that has committed to delivering. It’s also about not being scared of pushing back against short term changes of plan, because maintaining predictability and giving the team an opportunity to show that they can deliver is paramount.
Know your competition
As I suggested earlier, product managers should understand their competition intimately, and employ that knowledge to better position the product in the market. I’m always telling my teams that we need to know the competition better than they know themselves. Back when I was working at Nokia to create door-to-door journey planning, my competitor with the biggest mind-share was Google Transit. We worked hard on building better relationships with public transport agencies than Google had, in order to get data we needed. We did that by understanding those agencies’ planning, user information, and operations systems, and how they differed from Google’s, better than Google did. This may seem minor, but it’s these kind of business edges that will ultimately unlock value for your startup.
Some things you shouldn’t be doing
While product management is indeed a broad, busy, generalist role, there are certainly things that a product manager should avoid. First of all, no product manager should promise things without the involvement of their team. Product management is not project management! Team resources, features, quality, and timeline are all linked — and any “manager” who tells a team to change one without affecting the others will lose credibility with the team back in the real world. Let your team help you by giving them control over timeline for a specified deliverable. If you want it faster, change the specification, and have them estimate it again. Only by doing so can you get buy in, ownership, and accountability from the team for delivering on time.
A product manager is also not a CEO, and shouldn’t pretend to be one. Product managers are not in charge of a budget, the overall company strategy (business model, pricing), and are not in charge of closing sales. However, a CEO can — in the right circumstances — take on the qualities of a successful product manager by sticking to the principles I have outlined. One I’ve seen at Founders Factory accelerator is Luckytrip, who are fortunate enough to have a co-founding team that are consistently looking at their product from the user’s perspective, delivering an incredible amount of value for their loyal customers through a user-centric product development process. Shout out to them!
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Considering all of this, it should be clear why a product manager is an integral role in any startup. Unfortunately, I’ve seen incredible technical and design talent give up and leave projects that didn’t have a product process in place. But I’ve also seen some incredible talent rise through the ranks during my career; product managers who deliver amazing products are some of the most valuable people in a technology company.
Here at Founders Factory we’re on track to roll out over sixty new technology startups over five years. Software development is at the heart of startups that scale, and we like to think we know a thing or two about how to use product management to raise our chances of success. We currently have a community of more that fifteen dedicated product managers in one place, many in the companies that we have built, but we’ve also seen how valuable it can be for CEO’s to apply these processes to their startup. Remember: coordinate, communicate, and most importantly — ship it.
Please share your stories and experiences, as I’d love to hear them!
Justus Brown is Chief Product Officer at Founders Factory, a corporate backed incubator and accelerator based in London.
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