Building a Product-First Organisation Insights and Learnings – a conversation at Founders Factory leadership festival

A few weeks ago had the pleasure to moderate a conversation about building product first organisations at the Founders Factory leadership festival, this is the outcome of that conversation

Participants

Moderator: Sebastian Abdy Sabouné, Head of Product, Founders Factory

Georgie Smallwood, Chief Product Officer, N26

Eugenie Jacques, Head of Product, FF Paris Studio

Jacob George, Product Coach, FF London

Learnings about what product is

For the customer, every touch point with your company is ‘the product.’ It’s not just the app, but also the ad, the landing page, the customer service. Make sure you think about your product holistically and connect your teams together with the purpose of solving needs and problems for your customer in every area of your business. That’s what good product management looks like.

A product mindset hasve to be in every function in the organisation. There’s a risk of delegating all thinking to the product teams. This happens primarily in large organisations where multiple millions are spent on digital transformation and product thinking is limited to a few people in product roles. And it’s why startups are killing them on speed, innovation, and understanding the customer. Because you can’t afford not to have a product mindset in an early stage startup. You have to ensure everyone in your team also have it and puts customer first.

Siloing a product team is a mistake which happens in startups, too. To help fix it, create a cross-functional solutions team comprising people with product, sales and engineering backgrounds all working together to understand the customer.

About roadmaps and problem solving

A panellist had a 100 line-product roadmap spreadsheet greet her at a previous company. The developers were making a feature for every customer request! This might be ok if you are servicing a small set of customers early on in a startup, but when you need to focus and can’t afford to spend time on the ”wrong” things. You need to re-work the roadmap to be more aligned to the product vision and for it to be more proactive rather than reactive.

To help with this, you can and should approach product with a hypothesis and testing framework, and in order to make sure these hypotheses solve actual customer problems: create, test and reframe your hypothesis with your new learnings. It’s easy to forget this important part of product thinking and management because we are sometimes too busy executing. But make sure you take your time and take a step back to get the full picture of what you are doing.

Think about it. like the difference between optimisation and having a genuine impact. It’s easier. to just chase the next optimisation metrics, pushing the needle in the right direction and feel happy about it. But if you want to have a big impact going back to reframe a good hypothesis helps with that bigger picture view of your product.

It’s wrong to think working with a hypothesis processing experimentation takes longer and is expensive. No. Getting things wrong late is expensive; testing things early and failing will save you a lot of time mid-term. You will also have more confidence with your ideas and less of that sinking feeling that maybe the idea is not right.

When framing your hypothesis also think about the timeframe of your experiment. if you have a six-month experiment, you haven’t made your hypothesis granular or deep enough: tests should be as small as possible, over one or two weeks.

Founders and Factory people asked questions and made points. Here are the top ones.

Answering the question of when to hire your product person.

So, should you hire a product manager early on? It depends on the founding team: if someone in your founding team has the expertise for problem-solving and product thinking, you might want to hire a product designer next to them to help get those ideas come to life.

Otherwise, hire a product lead who is hands-on and can take your idea and frame it not just as a single solution but as a an overall strategy and vision.

You will need a different skillset from a product manager depending on your organisation but also according to the scale. Some product people are better at the early stage and some are better in later stages. Make sure you take time to understand what kind of product person you need before hiring.

Still, your CEO and founding team. needs to be involved with product and know what drives value and solves problems for customers.

Answering the question about what great product management looks like

Being a great product manager comprises lots of both hard and soft skills. Some can be learnt, others can’t. You can learn the mechanics about product management: how to create a backlog, how to work with engineering, how to run a process and you might become a great product owner. But the emotional intelligence, the curiosity for problem-solving, being comfortable with uncertainty: these are learnt by practising (and failing) like any other craft.

Try exposing the rest of the team to the customer value and value drivers: take engineers and sales team to testing sessions where users try out the product in front of them so that they can see how the decisions they made impacted the users.

You often have to tack like a ship and the points where you re-engage with the customer are important

Encourage curiosity and debate around unanswered questions; embed that as a way of operating and it will stand you in good stead.

Our intro to the things we talked about today you can find by reading Marty Cagan’s Inspired, Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri, and Sprint by Jake Knapp.

Also, check out the Product Experience Podcast, Mind the Product.

Talking of GV (Google Ventures), According to Ken Norton on the product experience, February 2019, it doesn’t invest in companies without product in their DNA.

Take Five Tips

The time may come when you move from a 100% business-focused approach to your company to a purer product-focused one. Your CEO will need to get buy-in from the teams;

Create a cross-functional solutions team comprising people with product, sales and engineering backgrounds all working together to understand the product role;

To a customer the “product” encompasses everything from the helpdesk to interactions with partner companies.

Using hypotheses about how a product solves customers’ problems and testing with a minimum viable product can save a lot of time!

Value to the customer is king! Have your engineers and salespeople witness customers using the product.