Shipping fast is your product strategy
Once you know how to ship quality, the only path to mastery is to learn how to ship fast.
For the past decade, I have interviewed probably more than 100 Product Managers and by far, the question I have gotten the most is: “If I join you, how can I influence the product roadmap and strategy?”. I do not think my answer is what the candidates expect, but it’s truly what I think: you don’t — but neither do I.
Why? Because you never really choose what’s next in your roadmap: your users and your competitors tell you what to do. What will make the difference with your competitors is your ability to deliver the features faster than them, with a better level of quality.
Just listen: the market and your customers bring you your roadmap on a silver platter.
With the hype around entrepreneurship combined with easy financing and lower entry costs than ever (and get ready, the no-code tsunami is just starting), almost all tech companies operate in a super competitive environment. And in this kind of environment, market trends are quite easy to read.
Let’s take our case at Qonto: we are building the all-in-one solution for managing SMBs’ finances. We are operating in 4 European countries: France, Spain, Italy and Germany. And the Fintech B2B market being super trendy, there is not a day when we do not face the launch of a new competitor in at least one of these countries.
And guess what, each and every one of these competitors is heading toward the same vision: building the “all-in-one solution for SMBs”. I just visited the landing page of 3 players I had on the top of my mind, and here is what I got:
Do you see any similarities?
Honestly, I cannot remember the last time I was genuinely surprised by a feature launched by a competitor. Of course, I have been surprised by how they built it, on what details they put their focus and what they decided to include or not in their features. But about the big picture, it was always expected, because all competitors know what our customers are expecting.
Why? Because we receive an immense amount of feedback every year: customer support tickets, Trustpilot, App stores, Twitter posts… So it’s not rocket science to know what our customers are asking for. Again, how to execute it is another question, and this is where our product expertise comes into play and where the difference between you and your competitors happens.
And highly competitive markets are nothing new
This is of course not specific to our industry. What we call the tech ecosystem is quite new, but highly competitive markets are not. As you probably know if you frequently read our articles, we are strongly inspired by a model that deeply changed how the car manufacturing industry operated during the 20th century: the Toyota Production System.
And when you look at the evolution of the innovations in the car industry throughout the 20th century, you’ll see that the whole market followed the same pattern:
- In the ’70s, it was about building cars that go fast.
- In the ’80s, new features in cars were about comfort and security.
- In the ’90s and 2000s, all car commercials I saw on TV while growing up were showcasing the low gas consumption of the cars.
- Now, for the past decade, it has all been about connectivity and autonomy (cars that park themselves, that drive themselves, that are connected to your favorite apps…).
So what made the difference amongst the car manufacturers? How did Toyota become, before the recent burst of Tesla, the most valuable car manufacturer in the world within 50 years? Source.
Execution made the difference. Toyota managed to ship innovation and cars faster than anyone, with a level of quality completely unachievable by their competitors, thanks to their production system.
The winners are the ones that execute fast, period.
So what does it mean? That your challenges are not just about building the best roadmap or having the best product vision. It’s about shipping fast what we know needs to be shipped, with the highest level of quality.
And this is something that has been forgotten by a lot of product teams in our industry. Too many of them overthink their roadmap and end up in a never-ending reflection cycle about whether they are working on the right topic or not, spending days un-prioritizing and re-prioritizing topics instead of shipping them, or worse, being scared of moving forward with a feature because “it might not be the right one”.
But if you are not always obsessed with shipping fast, one of your competitors will be. And the customers will choose the product that gives them the most value for money and that improves the fastest.
Ok, but what about quality?
As said above, quality should be built into everything you do. Shipping fast a poorly designed product makes no sense of course. But the point of this article is not to talk about quality — a lot of people already did, including us here.
My point is that from a Product expertise perspective, real mastery is not about just shipping quality. It’s about doing it at an amazing speed. It’s about thinking twice as fast as the product people working at your competitors.
Indeed, when you know how to solve a Rubik’s cube, what is the next step toward mastery? Solving it faster and faster. Same goes for product management.
So how do you ship good products fast?
There are 5 main things that will help you design quality products fast. Each of them could be the topic of an in-depth article (which I might write at some point in the future) — but I’ll stay high-level for now:
- Set up a pull flow system with your tech team. To put it simply, make sure your team always knows when they need to work on the next feature and what it is. Like a chef in a restaurant looking at their orders, Product Managers should always easily know what is the next thing to deliver so they can focus on cooking the most amazing feature just in time for the client.
- Measure your lead time. Set a delivery target and create a support system for projects that are at risk. At Qonto I put in place a 7-day target for the discovery phase of our features. When the lead time (the total time between the start of an operation and the end of it) of a feature is getting close to that, I personally receive an alert to go and help the Product Manager. Of course, some discovery work need more time than that when it’s about big features or new products, so the idea is not to absolutely reach this 7-day target. But it helps to react fast when needed.
- Think simple, think fast. The basic trap for a Product Manager is to get stuck in what I call the “edge case gears”. This is what happens when you try to satisfy all your customers and all their use cases (you end up like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times). When digging into a feature, limit your customer interviews to 2 to 5 customers max. Above that, you’ll just get swamped by useless edge cases and you’ll lose sight of what’s important — you can find more insight it’s this super interesting article, “Why you only need to test with 5 users”.
- Build a Design System and have your whole team know it by heart (if the concept of Design System is new to you, have a look at this article). This is key avoid needing to reinvent new elements for each new feature. Having this system will greatly speed up both your discovery and your delivery. In our case, it allows us to build Figma prototypes of new features within hours, just by reusing the elements of our design system.
- Trust your guts to make quick choices. To make good decisions quickly, you sometimes need to stop thinking and start feeling. One problematic behavior I see happening more and more is Product Managers not being able to make decisions without having data, or even worse pushing back everything because “we do not have the data to prove that something needs to be done”. But:
1- In many cases, data is of no help because it is not clean enough or you do not have enough data points to make sense out of it. Has this kind of conversation ever happened to you?
“Do you have any insight on the last improvement you’ve made to our funnel?”
“Yes, it is encouraging, we have a 45% conversion rate!”
“On how many users?”
“34”
“…”
2- Following data only will bring you to the same point as any of your competitors that also have data.
Make no mistake, data is super important. But it needs to be augmented with your expertise. And you need to build this expertise by constantly looking at other products and talking with customers. Not on a specific feature, but on their pains overall: have lunch or coffee with as many customers as possible, and never stop doing that.
And never forget: there is no room for waste in a highly competitive environment.
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