5 Product Management Rules that Shape GREAT Products
Mel Shakir, Securetech Managing Director with over 15 years of experience in bringing innovative cybersecurity solutions to market, is back to give his tips on product management. Recently, Mel served as the SVP of Product Development at Securonix and Director of Product Management at RSA NetWitness. Mel knows firsthand how crucial strategy is to develop products that customers love. In this dose, Mel covers the lessons he’s learned from leading product teams that can make or break your startup.
Rule #1: Founders must enforce organizational discipline
Great new ideas and feedback can come from anywhere: your customers, prospective customers, partners, engineers, and even competitors. Founders must ensure that all these ideas and feedback are heard and addressed on all customer-facing teams, including support, pre-sales, and pro-services teams, not solely in your product pipeline. Organizational discipline will ensure that no ideas or feedback are ignored.
It is difficult to meticulously review, prioritize, and respond to feedback that comes through many channels. Using productivity tools can make these tasks easier. Mel recommends JIRA, Freshdesk, Asana, dedicated slack channels, and more. These products can be used by many different teams and integrated for easy collaboration across your company.
Again, it is crucial that feedback does not go unheard. This could cause good ideas and customer reported pain points to not make it into the product, ultimately affecting both customers and customer-facing teams that bear the brunt of their dissatisfaction.
Rule #2: Executives must be aligned on GTM & product strategy
A core group of decision-makers: C-level executives, product, sales, and marketing leaders need to be on the same page on GTM strategy and segmentation. GTM strategy is critical since it drives product strategy. However, many companies get it backward by trying to sell what they have built to anyone who will buy the product, as opposed to targeting a specific segment that the product best caters to. Avoid letting sales drive the product strategy or the product will be taken in many different directions making it impossible to dominate any specific customer segment. If there is no top-down directive or lack of executive alignment, this can easily happen. Executive alignment is ideally achieved at the annual planning meetings with quarterly touchpoints to review outcomes and incorporate additional learnings.
Rule #3: Balance innovation with customer RFEs and technical debt
Product management is a balancing act of prioritizing innovation, customer requests for incremental enhancements (i.e. RFEs), bugs, and technical debt. In the early days of a startup, the focus should always be on innovation. It gives you a competitive edge and helps expand your customer base. However, as you begin to add more customers, RFEs, bugs, and technical debt begin to accrue and take away from valuable cycles of innovation.
Additionally, without a cohesive product strategy, driven by the GTM strategy, innovation could even completely stall because you’re trying to cater to multiple customer segments. You will end up making incremental customer enhancements instead of building the best version of your product for a particular segment.
An exciting product roadmap will be exciting for all customers and less likely to lead to feedback that will derail your company’s innovative strides.
Rule #4: Continuously validate and test
This might seem obvious, but surprisingly most companies still fail to adopt these practices. A primary goal of product management is efficiency. You must only deliver what current and prospective customers actually need. This is only possible with continuous customer feedback at the ideation, design, and development phases. You never want to end up with a product or feature that does not alleviate a customer’s pain point or make a significant improvement to the user’s experience.
Continuous testing goes hand in hand with continuous validation. This also needs to happen early and often with production quality data and at production scale by an actual subset of users who have been flagged for access to the new features. In order to implement these practices, you will need the commitment from executives to fund it and a major commitment from your engineering team. They will need to adopt agile development, pay attention to modular code design, and facilitate easy upgrades. Without the support of either of those teams, product management will never be able to make these processes work. This will ultimately impair your ability to be agile and product quality will suffer.
Rule #5: Understand your true MVP
Do not release a product before it is ready. By “ready” Mel means that you should have managed and communicated the expectations of customers, executives, and sales teams. There is always pressure to release new products and features as soon as possible. Executives and sales teams want to leverage the release to meet sales targets. Customers, though, want to get their pet feature or bug resolved as soon as possible.
You must ensure that your MVP does not have a new feature that is only half cooked and cannot be consumed as a result. If any criteria for a feature to be usable is missing, then you do not have your true MVP. It’s as simple as that. You want to avoid a customer getting excited about a feature only to find that it is not usable or hasn’t been sufficiently tested. Never forget that customer satisfaction is key.
“You don’t just want a lot of customers, you want happy customers.”
Here’s a litmus test. If you have many reference-able customers, then customer success is truly driving your company. If you don’t, you’re merely focusing on being the first to market or exit.
That’s Mel’s guide to product management summarized in five rules. To recap they are:
Enforce organizational discipline. Establish a culture where no ideas are left behind and invest early in productivity tools.
Product strategy is driven by GTM strategy. Executives must be aligned on GTM, or else you’ll end up with an inconsistent product that does not dominate any specific customer segment.
All companies must prioritize innovation, especially young companies. Avoid stalling innovation by balancing it with customer RFEs and technical debt.
Prioritize getting early and continuous user feedback and continuously testing with production-quality data, at production scale, by an actual subset of users.
Stand your ground against pressure to release early. A half-cooked feature or product will negatively impact all teams and ultimately, also negatively impacts sales.
There’s your brief guide to product management from a product expert that we’re lucky to have on the Dreamit team. If you have any questions about product management at your startup, book office hours with Mel here.
By Alana Hill, Securetech Associate at Dreamit Ventures
Book Office Hours with the Securetech team.
