DISQUS

davecort · 4 months ago

One of the big challenges in determining vision and scope for any product is balancing the tactical with the strategic. Agile is good, and being responsive to customer requests and changing market conditions is good, but it's also important to keep focused on the larger, strategic vision. There is a happy medium where you can be both responsive and strategic.

Second, while Sean alludes to this point, I think it's good to be explicit. Competitive data is merely a proxy for customer needs. Your competitors success simply means they are addressing customer needs better than you. But never focus on beating the competition. Focus on being the best at addressing customer needs. From the book "Good to Great":

If you had the opportunity to sit down and read all 2000+ pages of the transcripts from the Good to Great interviews, you’d be struck by the utter absence of talk about “competitive strategy.” Yes, they did talk about strategy, and they did talk about performance; they did talk about becoming the best, and they even talked about winning. But they never talked in reactionary terms and never defined their strategies principally in response to what others were doing. They talked in terms of what they were trying to create, and how they were trying to improve relative to an absolute standard of excellence.

robertacker · 4 months ago

Yes, good post Sean. You shed light a key differentiator that start-ups SHOULD have over larger competitors since start-ups have the ability to "understand your customers’ needs and desires enough to narrow your offering down..." They can focus on a single customer pain point and solve it better (easier to use, more accurate, etc.) than anyone else. Bigger companies have to worry about making sure key executive's favorite features are added, legacy users aren't upset by too many changes, formal processes are followed, etc etc., allowing disruptive start-ups to create the successful innovative products if those start-ups don't loose site of what you outlined in your post.

I also agree with rtarasi that it is also key to keep this mindset after the first version launches. I've found that that is the time everyone whose favorite feature didn't make it into the first release now piles on, the first overly vocal early adopters begin making lots of suggested changes, and even board members and investors pass on features their spouses suggested. The company needs to be especially vigilant at that time not to loose its product vision. It should also clearly define what focused, empowered individual owns the decisions on what does/doesn't go in the next releases so they don't end up overreacting to all the input they are going to get.

Steve Carlson · 4 months ago

While my experience comes from product development efforts within Global 50 companies, the same principles hold true. There is constantly a desire and pressure to make the product as broadly appealing, to the widest range of customers, as possible. This quickly leads to a loss in focus and significantly longer lead times and development costs. And, ultimately, a product that is oftentimes too complex for customers to adopt.

Two additional thoughts based on the article/comments:
1) Pre-launch testing (ala direct mail and OBTM historical examples) is a great way to determine if your core product features resonate strongly with a target market. The internet has only strengthened the capability for such testing. If the a feature doesn't make it into a 15 second offer, than it's not core and thus should not be a focus of development out of the gate.

2) Be wary of responding to what your competitors are doing. Personal experience has shown time and again that just because a competitor is devoting a significant amount of resources towards a certain product or category, it doesn't mean that they have any better understanding of consumer needs than you do. Have confidence and faith in your "clarity of vision"

Rocco Tarasi · 4 months ago

i couldn't agree more with this, having lived through the exact same circumstances. The only thing I would add is the importance for a start-up to stay simple post-launch too - as you said, with first releases you can easily convince yourself to add more features, but DON'T lose that mindset in subsequent releases when you have paying customers (or even worse, prospective paying customers) saying "we really need this additional feature". In the business space more so than the consumer space, if you start "chasing dollars with new features" you'll quickly get to the bloatware you mentioned. Just say no. It goes back to the Innovator's Dilemma concept - while it seems counterintuitive, you can't listen too much to your current customers, and the "clarity of vision" that you mentioned is the grounding you need to put feature requests into perspective.

chrislunt · 4 months ago

I've recently heard intriguing stories of how some people test the market before they even build the product solely through advertising--a practice that extends back to the direct mail days.

This article is also an interesting insight into the culture that bogged down Yahoo. Consensus building is time consuming, and not clearly the path the best product.

Michael Cerda · 4 months ago

Well said Sean - I do a release each week, and each one is tied to a) customer feedback and b) a larger vision (one which has legs of her own now).

Tom Cole · 4 months ago

Sean, nice post! For startups, staying focused is an imperative that goes beyond product development, but your example shows that big companies need to be mindful of product scope creep as well. The agile programming methodology widely used these days is a perfect way of institutionalizing tight, focused, frequent product releases.

sean o'malley · 4 months ago

@davecort and @stevecarlson: Point well taken regarding 'clarity of vision.' It's very easy to get caught up in the competition and chase after every new feature because it looks game changing. I call this 'Feature Poker' and a startup can never win at that game.

However, I also believe that a vision has to deal with the brutal realities of the current market environment. In the case of Messenger, our cycles were so long that the only way we felt we could deal with the market realities was to add features to the current release. Skype's feature set wasn't outside of our vision it was just a matter of where it fell in the priorities.

So, smaller, more iterative releases would have allowed us to deal with the market realities in a more timely manner.

Jackson Gates · 4 months ago

Good post Sean. Hardest release is the first release... respect to all entrepreneurs who get something live regardless of how much traction it gets.

Btw - @chrislunt what has Nombray become? Looks like a new vision.

Arthur Klepchukov · 4 months ago

"narrow your offering down to the minimum set of features necessary to acquire and inspire" was my favorite part. I feel like it's a fine line to walk because you'll always talk to people who think what you demo them is too basic and they wouldn't use it. Resisting the urge to add more to convert them is hard.

Do you think company size affects what the minimum viable product is? Yahoo would probably get a lot more flack for putting out something early and incomplete than a startup who did the same.

Mehul Sanghavi · 4 months ago

Sean - what a wonderful article! We had a great time working on the Messenger client - but I agree with you on the fact that v7 turned into a bloated application. I would like to add to one more reason why it became that way. Messenger until that point in time was a single track, single client application. Development took any where from 6 to 8 months or longer and that limited the ability to sequence in more than a single release over a period of a year. From a PM's perspective, it was important to 'catch' the next release vehicle to get a feature developed that they most cared about. This can be solved by having carefully managed application tracks that are geared to specific audience segments/features releases coupled with having agile teams working on them in parallel.

I've been doing product management for a long time now and I sometimes, even now, chase the 'elusive' perfect product! Though I have gotten wiser to overcome that most of the times, it’s my opinion that PMs are pre-disposed to fall into this trap. Maybe it’s in our genes :). Cheers, Mehul.

Andy Smith · 4 months ago

It's great to see all of these go-to-market ideas together in one simple post. Your front-line experience as the incumbent leader with Yahoo Messenger is serving you and your portfolio companies well today. In addition to startups who are continuously seeking significant business advice, this type of thinking needs to infect the enterprise.

The counter-intuitiveness of favoring time to market, and witnessed experience in customers hands over product completeness and perfection strikes me as difficult for many product managers to handle on at least 3-1/2 counts:
1) As the technical product guy, more features = more good
2) As the big, established brand: error-free product + complete documentation = required to meet perceived leader quality standard
3) As the market incumbent: can't release a less capable product than the upstart entrant
3-1/2) As the brand leader you believe that your brand and some switching costs will keep your customers waiting for you.

I'm hoping you'll address how you integrate customer test/release often approach into your future posts.

Doc Johnson · 1 week ago

Great advice in this article, especially with trying to hit such a fast moving target in the tech world.

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