Practicing the Art of the Lazy Product Manager

To be a high-growth startup, build less. Here’s how.

This is part 2 of a 2-article series (part 1 is here)

It took me seven years of working in tech, seven years building startups, and two years getting an MBA to get a handle on this…

(Unfortunately, the degree did not bestow my eureka moment. Thanks though MIT!)

More product management is not required for startup success.

You can achieve 100x growth without a huge product team. In fact, many successful high-growth teams were small. Just take a look at the examples compiled by my colleague, David Frankel:

• Mojang (creators of Minecraft): 12 employees, $80M revenue
• Instagram: 13 employees, 30M users
• Whatsapp: 55 employees, 33B daily messages
• Plenty of Fish: 75 employees, $100M revenue
• Craigslist: 40 employees, 60M users

If more is not the answer, what works instead?

In Part 1 of this series, I made the case for Lazy Product Managers, to challenge the conventional wisdom of product management. Lazy Product Managers are not lazy by any means. They are strategic. Rather than tackling a million user demands and a million product features — which is what many product managers end up doing — they seek out and stick to the one strategy with the most growth potential.

So, how do you practice the Art of the Lazy Product Manager (i.e. become more strategic at your startup)? Where do you start?

The good news is, the strategy doesn’t have to be hard. Yes, there are boatloads of books and business school classes on it. But, in reality, the hardest part of the strategy is simply discipline: discipline to do the right things; discipline to make sure you and your team are on track; and discipline to say no to everything else that doesn’t move the needle.

To build your mental muscle for strategy, adopt these three habits:

1. Ask the right questions.

The biggest insight I’ve ever learned is that everything changes depending on what questions you’re asking. Even the worst of situations can look dramatically different when founders ask the right questions to reframe the issues at hand.

If things are not working as you hope, it is the perfect moment to pause and check if you are asking the right questions. Even if the path forward seems clear, it’s still essential to check in regularly with yourself and your team. Here are the simple questions I ask every startup team I work with.

• What’s bleeding? What is the unique, pressing pain point that you’re solving and for whom? By seeking urgency, you can ensure that people will take action, switch, adopt or buy. Sadly, I find that user inertia is too often underestimated by passionate founders (including myself, at times). Even better: is your target user prepared to pay you to solve their pain point?
• What’s your superpower? What are you uniquely bringing to the table that will help solve this better than anyone else? This is not just your superpower, it’s your competitive advantage. Even better: how do you increase your (and your team’s) superpowers over time?
• How can you execute to create consistently spectacular results? What do your results show you about how well you are executing? It’s only when you can repeat and improve your execution every single time that you’re ready for scale. Even better: what do you take away from your past results — what adjustments should you make moving forward?
• How can you optimize for learning? How do you optimize your learning in terms of reaching the most customers as quickly as possible? Learning speed will determine how accurate your strategy will be. Even better: can you better and more thoroughly answer any of the other questions above?

2. Do an honest gut check on the market feedback you’ve received to date.

A gut check sounds fluffy, but your intuition is a good litmus test of something is working or not. Be willing to ask — and truthfully answer — the hard questions. When it comes to market feedback, you might already know what your startup needs to start/stop/continue doing, but you may not have acted on it yet. And you have two choices: to grow or to die. Pick one.

To take a proper step back, pay attention to the following key areas of market feedback:

• User adoption: do you have a nice steady ramp with users clamoring for your product and you racing to fill demand? If not, why?
• Feature pivots (or not): Does anything need tweaking or abandoning entirely?
• Sales cycle: How do factors of your sales cycle work for or against you? Have you quantified the time it takes to close a contract?
• Market maturity: Are you educating a market or fooling yourself?

3. Leaving money on the table, a.k.a. ruthlessly prioritizing.

My colleague, Eric Paley (ranked #11 on Forbes’ Midas List this year), often says that being strategic sometimes means leaving money on the table. If making hard choices doesn’t hurt (a little bit), you may not be prioritizing. And, in a fast-moving world, trying to do everything puts you at risk of capsizing. It is, therefore, far better to be exceptional at a few things, than to be mediocre at many things.

In other words, discard, decide against or delay everything that is not strategic. Bring your team and stakeholders into one room and go through the following steps to ruthlessly prioritize:

• Do a force ranking exercise: Take a list of opportunities and sort them in order of importance/size/potential. Pick the top 2–3 and focus on them for the rest of the quarter or year.
• Focus on The One Thing: Once you have the top 2–3 priorities, you can go even further. Just ask yourself and your team this one question: “If I could only do one thing to save the farm/win the war, what would it be?” Then, drop everything else.
• Create a “not-to-do-list”: For example, you could agree on not developing features that don’t affect the bottom line — engagement, revenue, retention or whatever your team decides matters most — or to limit effort to less than 10% of your team’s time.

Now, you and your team might not agree on everything at first and that’s perfectly normal. Just remember that having these difficult conversations much earlier on will give everyone clarity down the line. This makes all the difference between a startup (speedboat) and a big company (cruise ship). If you hit a wall discussion wise, revisit things at a later time, so that you can hash everything out before you start ramping up.

Here’s the truth that most people won’t tell you upfront: when hundreds of thousands of startups are competing for money, time and attention at the same time, only the ultra-competitive, ultra-strategic performers win. And it might seem counterintuitive, but my bet will be on the Lazy Product Manager. If you have only one shot, make sure you’re taking the right one.

— -

Like what you read? Follow me and be sure to check out part 1 of my Lazy Product Manager series:

• The Art of the Lazy Product Manager (14,500+ views)

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 314,785+ people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.