🚨ALERT🚨 In Person Event!

Come join me and Christine de Wendel, co-founder and CEO at sundayapp, at Atlanta Tech Village **THIS WEDNESDAY** for a fireside chat. We’ll cover how to find a great idea, fundraising, scaling, and of course, product! 😉

Wed, Nov 13, 12-1:30p | Register here

(and now back to regularly scheduled programming…)

Always Be Building

What’s the #1 thing on the mind of a software founder??

PRODUCT!

(Also: customers, hiring, coffee, selling, cash flow, cap tables, sleep, food, more coffee.)

Product is creative, iterative, and there’s so many inputs — customers, investors, engineers, the internet, your own brain!

It can be hard to figure out where to start (or finish!) when it comes to product.

You know the importance of a well-built product and thoughtful roadmap but it’s easier said than done.

Here are 6 of my favorite ideas to guide you on product building.

Different frameworks work better for different companies, founders, or stages.

Pick what feels right for you and share other favorites below! 👇👇

1. First 3 Features

Especially when you’re getting started, I LOVE the question Jon Birdsong asks:

What are your first 3 features?

It forces you to:

• Focus

• Prioritize

• Deeply understand your customer

Once you are further along, it’s still a helpful question!

Do you know your next 3 features? What is the value to customers and impact to the business? Does everyone in the company know what they are and why?

2. 80/20 Rule

The only features allowed on the roadmap will serve 80% of your customers. No one-off features for a fringe (but large) customer.

We followed this religiously at Pardot. We turned down large deals or great logos because they needed one feature…that no one else would use.

This worked especially well because we focused on small and medium business (SMB) customers. A small customer paid $12,000/yr. A large customer paid $36,000/yr.

It gets harder when your small customers are $5,000/yr and large customers are $500,000/yr.

And, if you sell $1M+ contracts, the 80/20 rule probably doesn’t apply. Lootttttsss of custom work at that price point.

Here’s the most important thing to remember:

Building one-off features is always painful.

Always.

Takes longer than you think, you have to maintain it, and it’s never as easy to “repurpose” for another customer as you think.

If you’re small and it’s a really big customer, maybe it keeps the lights on. If you decide to do it, for the love, make 100% sure you have a signed contract for a year or more before you start building things!!!!!

That said, even if you have big customers, 80/20 is always a great framework to keep you focused on adding the most value for most of your customers.

3. Have An Opinion

Marco Dell’Olio, CTO and co-founder of Zinnia, said this so well:

We want to have an opinionated product.

Zinnia is a copilot for account executives (AEs), using best practices learned from Lauren Goodell as a top AE at Microsoft and Salesforce. It doesn’t let any rep do any process. Built into the product are certain “opinions” about what good selling looks like.

David Cummings shared similar advice recently (paraphrasing):

Listen to customers, take their feedback, then use your own filter and vision of where the world is going to decide what to build.

A small example:

We never did any direct mail functionality at Pardot. Sending direct mail (aka in-your-mailbox-at-your-house advertising postcards) was often requested by customers and several competitors did it.

We did not. The world was going digital. That was our belief and vision. It was different than others and that was okay. It attracted the right users, kept our product focused, and became part of our thought leadership platform.

4. “Customers don’t know what they want.”

A famous Steve Jobs quote which is sorta right.

Customers DO know what their frustrations are.

And you should absolutely be listening to your customers!!!!!!

Solving customer problems = how you make money.

But don’t do exactly what your customers say all the time!

(See also “Have An Opinion”, “80/20 Rule” and “Negative Roadmap.” There’s a theme! 😂)

Customers will kindly and helpfully tell you exactly how to build your product to solve their problem.

These are almost always bad ideas.

And I say this as a well-meaning software customer who has suggested many bad ideas!!!

Your customers are smart and experts at what they do!

But they don’t have the full context and are rarely “product” folks.

What to do?

Dig in to understand what they are trying to accomplish.

Also called the 5 Whys.

Customer: I need a green “Send Email” button right here!

Product: Oh, you want a green “Send Email” button there? Why? What are you trying to accomplish?

Customer: I need to email this chart to my boss.

Product: Interesting. Why’s that?

Customer: She wants to see the data every day.

Product: I see. How does she use the data?

Customer: She compiles it into an ROI analysis and shares with her boss.

Product: Why’s that?

Customer: This product is expensive and we have to show the value. Also, if we don’t export the data daily, we can’t go back and get it.

BOOM.

This customer doesn’t need a send email button. They need better ROI reporting.

A great product person will understand the customer problem — sometimes even better than the customer does — and figure out the most simple, elegant, practical solution. (Billy Hoffman is a genius at this!)

It will solve this customer’s problem but also be designed and implemented to solve other customers’ problems too!

#PROTIP
Usually there’s a handful of customers who DO have really good product ideas. Figure out who they are and stay in touch regularly.

5. Negative Roadmap

You have a lot of functionality you definitely want to build.

Just as important:

What are you NOT going to build?

Awesome overview of a Negative Roadmap from David Cummings.

6. Fast, Cheap, Good. Pick 2.

Last but not least, here’s a friendly reminder that EVERYTHING is a tradeoff.

• Go fast, keep it lean, product won’t be perfect.

• High speed, high quality, big price tag.

• Beautiful product, small team, takes a long time.

No right or wrong answer. Depends on your market and stage.

Go in eyes wide open and be intentional about what you are choosing.

When in doubt, my rec (for a startup) is speed.

The company with the fastest customer feedback loop has the best chance of building something customers love!

What are your favorite product ideas? What helped you build faster or smarter? Do you use any of these product concepts?