From product to platform.
Product teams work together to design and build products and features to better meet customers needs and in turn make their software more functional and valuable. Different roles and personalities on the team may have different ideas on how to best accomplish this. I am a PM by background. My cofounder is an extremely talented UX designer (among other things). I’ve noticed that we tend to approach prioritization through slightly different lens. I spend most of my time thinking about what our product CAN do where Joe spends more time thinking about what a product is FOR doing. It’s important to consider both when bringing products to market through various stages of growth. This is one of the reasons Joe and I work so well together.
Seeking product market fit
A good PM knows how work with customers to test products in market before they are even built. This means having some idea of what problem(s) you are solving and approaching customers with the willingness to do manual work to validate your ideas. At this stage you should have a solid idea what your technology can accomplish, but likely need more validation for how customers want to use it. You may have a good idea of what your product is FOR at this stage, but your priory needs to be ensuring that you have enough functionality to properly test your hypothesis.
Building your product
Once you have validated that what you are going to build will be valuable, its time to build for that customer. This means designing workflows that make sense to them and demonstrating that you understand what is valuable about your product. As an early stage company, you probably don’t have time to build a robust feature set but with the proper focus you can do something specific very well. A good product team will always be thinking about where the product is going and designing for scalability, but at this stage you need happy customers who are going to help you figure out how to prioritize new features (when you are ready for that).
Scaling Customers
As you begin to scale customers (and revenue), you will have increased importance on maintenance, security, extensibility, etc. This will make it difficult to move as quickly (even with your massive engineering team), but it is very important to continue to innovate and see around corners. As a general rule of thumb, your product will need to do more the more customers you support. Now is the time that you need to think more about designing a platform that is for doing all of the things it is capable of doing. This is a luxury that most companies never get to.
