Why Most Product Organisations Are So Chaotic
And a 3-Step Process for Creating Alignment, Autonomy & Impact That We’ve used to Move From Idea to Profitability in 4 Months
Whether you are working on an existing product, or developing a new one, just pause for a second to answer the following question:
What’s your unique product insight?
All great companies have one unique product insight - that thing that drives almost everything they do as a product team - yet most companies fail to understand why having a unique product insight is so important.
They get the basics all wrong.
They look at the competition and try to base decisions off of what the competition is up to:
Which features do they have? What can we copy? What should we not bother with? How do we do a better, more simple, more enjoyable, more fill-in-the-blank version of them?
You end up with a slightly different, but essentially similar, product.
And because you start by copying, you end up building a culture & organisation that fails to incentivise innovation, so you carry on copying the competition.
Always one step behind.
Copying works - for a while - but, ultimately, leads to failure, as we attempt to emulate the success of the competition, but end up with an obfuscated unique selling point — and a confused target customer who can’t work out who or what your product is precisely for.
Copying Creates Chaos
Internally, a culture of copying creates chaos for those working in product.
If we never start with a clear vision of what we want to change in the world - nor for whom - teams have no idea of really why we are doing everything in the first place.
This means there is no alignment over what, specifically, we want to achieve and for whom.
This lack of alignment creates chaos, as everything is open to interpretation & everybody ends up sort of doing their own thing.
One founder thinks the team are doing one thing. The other thinks the team are doing another.
And the Product Manager is off doing their own thing trying to work out what they should be doing in the first place. But just as they get a coherent strategy together, they suffer an “executive swoop and poop,” as Jared Spool, founder of User Interface Engineering2 and cofounder of Cen- terCentre, describes it:
Like a seagull attack from leadership, when “the executive swoops into the project and poops all over the team’s design, flying away as fast as they came, leaving carnage and rubble in their wake.”
And as the company grows, this misalignment and miscommunication just exacerbates the already chaotic internal environment of the company.
As results fail to materialise, and leadership has no idea what they want to achieve on a high level, many companies enter panic mode:
They try to just do everything imaginable - to copy all of the features, all of the competition, to target all of the kinds of customers imaginable.
They try to build everything for everyone and, as a result, they end up with a mediocre, over-engineered, feature-heavy product that nobody is interested in using.
So they spend more and more money on sales & marketing & customer support to boost growth.
And they try to build more, more, more, rather than focusing on what matters:
Building just a few high-quality features for a very specific type of customer & doubling down on those features that those customers love about your product.
How To Create a Compelling Product Vision
This is why crafting a compelling product vision from Day 1 is so important.
Without it, the company inevitably falls into chaos & we end up with a generic product nobody is interested in using, let alone paying for.
Remember, the product is not just a set of features once somebody signs up for something. It’s everything.
It is the whole experience a customer has when engaging with you as a business.
It touches upon everything a company does. Who we build awareness with? Who we try to activate? Who uses the core features of the product?
Therefore, we must be aligned in understand what change we want to bring about & for whom across the organisation.
If we get this wrong, we are going to have massive drop-off at every step of the funnel because it’s simply the wrong thing for the wrong person:
Maybe sales targets one kind of customer, but the core product is built for another.
Or product isn’t clear on the one or two things the customer really values , so they go ahead and build a load of low-value features that confuse the core value proposition.
Step 1: Define Your Niche
To craft our product vision, we need to go really specific and start with the basics:
“Who is your target customer?”
Not everyone, because “everyone” doesn’t care about their product.
Believing that everyone would benefit if they just got on board. But they never do. And they never will. “Everyone won’t hear you. They won’t understand you. And, most of all, they won’t act.”
So instead, ask yourself,
“Who specifically is this change for?”
As an example, in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched a social network for Harvard students only. Look where Facebook is now.
This specific audience - that “who” - is what we call our niche:
A specific, recognisable, distinct group of people that we want to target & ultimately sell our products too.
“Men” or “young men” is not specific. “John from down the street, who has always struggled to find a great job” is specific.
And once we go specific, we should “shun the non-believers” and only care about the opinion of those that are actually open to trying & buying our product.
The goal of all of our product work is to convert some people from within our niche into a High Experience Customer - somebody who we have validated is getting a lot of value from our product & who will spread the word to other people in our niche about our product.
To define our niche, we need to answer the following questions:
What is the niche?
What is their current situation?
What is their desired situation?
What do they believe?
What kind of vocabulary does your niche use?
- What is the niche? e.g. Product Managers
- What is their current situation? e.g. Frustrated, stagnating maybe, fed up with over-theoretical courses
- What is their desired situation? e.g. Autonomy, purpose, to build great products
- What do they believe? e.g. They can’t get all that in their current company, or current role, or any external course
- What kind of vocabulary does your niche use? e.g. Scrum, Feature Factory, product, value, customers, stakeholders, prioritisation, planning
And when we define our niche, we need to ignore the competition, returning to first principles & understanding on a basic level who our customer is, where they are at & what they desire:
As many companies look to the competition for ideas, or try to build something for everyone, they simply don’t have a good idea of who their customer is, what frustrates them & what their ideal situation is. This is where our slippery descent into chaos & mediocrity starts.
As Seth Godin, the Godfather of modern marketing points out:
You can’t come up with a product or service and THEN decide to market it.
Yet this is what many companies in fact do.
Step 2: Understand Pain Points
Once we have defined the key assumptions about our niche - remember, these are assumptions until we prove them to be true - we need to actually validate these with people from our niche.
To do so, we need to set up 10 discovery calls - or user interviews - in order to understand who our niche is, what frustrates them & what their ideal situation would be so that, in our final step, step 3, we can understand what opportunities there are to serve our niche.
To do so:
- Reach out to 100 people from your niche (we cover tactics to do this with LinkedIn and Facebook in the Prod MBA in detail)
- Try to set up 10 discovery calls by asking something like, “Hey, I’m just doing some research about, for example, product management, & would love a quick 10-minute chat. Would Tue or Wed afternoon work?” (Assume 5 will drop off or just forget once you get a confirmation, so aim for 10 calls)
- Cover the following questions in that call. Keep the call conversational & open, bu try to nudge the conversation in a direction which covers these points in the 15–30mins you have with the interviewee
- Tell me a little bit about yourself
- What is the main challenge you are facing at the moment in relation to your role?
- How have you tried to solve this before?What has prevented you solving this in the past?
- If you had a magic wand, how would you ideal solve this?
- Would you be willing to have another call in a few weeks to test our solution
As you’re listening, write down maximum 5 keywords or phrases for each question.
An example from when we were crafting the Prod MBA product vision:
For my interview with Konstantin, who I validated early on in the interview was part of our niche as a “frustrated PM”, I highlighted: “PM” & “Feature Factory” for his current situation, as well as 3 problems: “Too theoretical”, “Can’t apply in current role” & “Lack of mentorship”.
Why? We felt there was an opportunity in the fact he had tried lots of courses, but found them too theoretical, lacking guidance. Combine this with an inability to apply things he learnt in his current role — due to lack of autonomy — and we felt there was something there to explore further.
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Once you’ve interviewed 5 people from your niche, you can then start drawing out the key learnings.
I’ve only filled out the results of two interviews here to keep it simple:
On the left, I’ve written out the problems I heard about e.g. “Courses too theoretical”.
And for each interviewee, I’ve put a “1” where that problem was a problem for them, to give me a quantified total in the final column to visualise how often the problem occurred across all our interviewees.
Once we add two, the key pains & frustrations start to emerge. For example, in our survey, these were “courses too theoretical” and “current role lacks autonomy to try full product process”.
(Note: We also want to be careful to not blindly follow the data! Be data-informed, not data-driven, as a lot of the art of running a discovery call is to understand problems that may not even have been mentioned, or to understand that some problems are far more acute than others, and therefore represent a bigger, better opportunity to focus on, even if only reported by a handful of interviewees.)
Step 3: Convert to Opportunity
Finally, we now want to convert our niche’s pain points into a product opportunity, represented by our unique product insight, and, ultimately, use that insight to help us craft our product vision statement.
To craft our product vision we need to do the following:
- Take 1–2 key niche pain points & flip them into opportunities. For example, where we see “too theoretical”, we flip this to “really practical”. “Too slow” becomes “lightning fast”.
- We then convert these opportunities into a compelling statement e.g. “A hands-on, 6-week training to experience building a product from idea to validation & beyond”
Our Product Vision:
“A hands-on, 6-week training to experience building a product from idea to validation & beyond”
In the case of the Prod MBA product vision, “hands-on” better conveys our attempt to focus on “really practical”. “Build product from idea to validation” covers our niche frustration with lacking autonomy in their current role.
And nobody mentioned “build product from idea to validation & beyond”, but we see this as a key underlying desire of many people in our niche — these frustrated product people — because it makes sense when couched within our understanding of their desire to become a product leader &, in many cases, to learn how to start their own business in future.
We’ve used this framework at Product Mastery to come up with our core product, the Prod MBA, to market it with no budget, & to generate enough revenue from it to achieve profitability in just 4 months by creating a product that delivers a lot of value for a very specific niche.
In the case of Superhuman, an extremely successful email product company, they focus on building “the fastest email experience ever made” for a niche of busy tech leaders — successfully competing with Gmail and charging $30 per month in the process, because of their clear product vision & relentless delivery on that vision.
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The goal is to apply this 3-step process, which should only take a few days to complete, with a clear, compelling and data-informed product vision to align your organisation & to deliver more value for your customers.
And that’s it.
That’s how you can create & validate a product vision from scratch, with no product, no team, no nothing, to align & direct your product efforts. And the efforts of the company.
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We’ve only touched upon how to implement this framework in this article, but you can see the potential of this in action, right?
Ultimately, it consistently leads to MUCH better product decisions.
And you can hopefully see the potential for yourself:
If you can learn how to define such a product vision, align your team around it & execute towards it, then you will start having a disproportionate impact on your customer & on your business.
And by delivering massive value, you line yourself for rapid promotion, greater autonomy in your decision-making and, ultimately, greater purpose through your ability to deliver great products.
To learn how to fast-track your product career in practice, we still have a few places in the next cohort of the Prod MBA. Just book a call to learn more here.
