Contextual

Category: Product Market Fit

  • Getting Product Market Fit – Part 2: Avoiding Feature Delusion and Biases

    In this part Elliot and I discuss the role of founders as product managers.

    Because the skills of Product Managers are not well understood, it doesn’t exist as a job role in the start of a company. So the founders take on the role – at the same time founders are often great, charismatic sales people – here are two common results:

    1. The founder starts out a meeting with the plan to get feedback about an idea or product. Somewhere they start to flip from questions to statements and start telling the interviewee how awesome this product will be/is. Naturally the interviewee doesn’t want to argue too much and so the founder walks away with a rock-solid validation 🙂

    2. One of the founding teams goes out to a meeting and returns with a new feature never previously discussed or even a major pivot! Of course this may be valid, but a data-point of 1 needs some extra research.

    Here Elliot proposes some ways to get space between your skill to sell (your ability to transmit a Steve-Jobs-Like-Reality-Distortion-Field) and being receptive enough to not get deluded about your product vision.

    In Part 3 we’ll look at unconscious biases that may underlie common Product Market Fit misses. Also how this maps into Product Roadmap prioritization.

  • Getting Product Market Fit – Part 1: Founder Market Fit

    We are involved with Product Managers globally but we’re in a Sydney startup community of a few hundred companies in one building! Its an amazing place of learning and serendipity. Some of these startups are building the future and this short series of posts dives deep on recurring challenges we hear.

    This first post is a fireside chat on Product Market Fit I did with Elliot Ng – Director of Product Management, Search at Google and a veteran of 3 startups. It was a great talk and he brought a lot of wisdom to the night.

    In this clip we explored challenges of getting early stage product market fit and the role of founders – too often these days there are startups with a solution looking for a problem, Elliot explains the best case:

    Here, Elliot covers the scenario where true disruption, or market transition is occurring and even the founders don’t have subject matter expertize.

    And here is the ideal founder situation where one member of the team has deep industry experience and this informs the startup’s mission right from the start.

    In other words this is called Founder/Market Fit!

    As Steve Blank would say – “Get out of the building!”

    Here Elliot describes how they rapidly validated their product via pitching and correlating across multiple prospects and existing customers.

    And lastly for this post, discusses how focussing on hypotheses that confirm whether you have a business or not is the priority.

    In the next post, we’ll look at founders as product managers and the best ways to not get deluded about your product.