0 to 1 Product Manager

“0 to 1 product management is simple but very hard to get right, billions of dollars and months of time and effort could be saved if PMs follow a few basic principles”

Does product management vary between before and after product-market-fit (PMF)? This is the fundamental question that led me to research this idea of 0 to 1 product manager and how his/her role differs from a PM that is trying to grow an established product.

What is the key objective for a pre-PMF product? It’s to find and solve a customer problem in a large market.

What is the key objective for a post-PMF product? It’s to grow the business. For example, you are an e-commerce company selling shoes online, you found your customers, you are able to serve them well (sales, marketing, support). Now, how can you grow this business? There are a few options –

Sell other products augmenting the shoe product line e.g clothing, caps
Sell shoes to more people (expand to other markets, e.g. international)
Sell analytics to healthcare companies e.g. training data

Product management can focus on creating new products to increase ARPU or introduce existing products to new markets (other countries, segments etc). When you don’t know that “shoe” is your product or “lack of shoe” is the problem to solve, does the PM role change in that context? i.e. before product market fit.

On a typical day, a PM makes many decisions, tradeoffs and prioritizes product features while keeping ROI at the center of it all. ROI framework works very well for a post-PMF product. For a pre-PMF product, if we try to optimize ROI, we will end up building a local optima. Yet we cannot ignore ROI, I have made this mistake a few times, “build it and they will come” may work but the question is “will they just come or will they also buy?”. What do I mean by that? Would I be able to convert the users to paid users? Am I providing value? Do they perceive value in the product that is worth spending money on? My point is, for a product that has not found PMF, while ROI metric is important, it alone cannot be the metric that’s driving decisions to help us find product-market-fit.

For example, at Akamai we developed a product that can be integrated into streaming apps to enable downloads for offline consumption. This is a great product, has a good market fit and a positive ROI. However, there are other factors that needed to be weighed in, competitive offerings, business model, long term company strategy, margin, customer delight. If ROI is the only metric we cared about, we would have pushed the product ahead but we decided to not pursue that product even though we had 10 paying customers and close to one million dollars in annual recurring license revenue in the first year of launch.

So how exactly is product manager’s role different before PMF? PM’s main objectives before PMF are to –

Identify a customer problem in a large market, and go solve that problem. This takes building, iterating, learning, listening to the customer, there is no overnight eureka moment here. The most crucial superpower any successful pre-PMF product team can posses is experimenting, learning from data (qualitative and quantitative) and quickly iterating to reach PMF.
Ensure that the customer is willing to pay for your product.
Be clear on who the user and customer are for your product, sometimes they are the same people and sometimes not.

“When you are before PMF, focus obsessively on getting to product/market fit. Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital — whatever is required. When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else. I’m not suggesting that you do ignore everything else — just that judging from what I’ve seen in successful startups, you can.“
Marc Andreessen – https://a16z.com/2017/02/18/12-things-about-product-market-fit/

Let’s unpack that to get a sense of what frameworks, metrics and tools a PM could use to get to PMF.

First, identify a customer problem in a large market, how to do that? Through build-measure-iterate loops. Running experiments, be willing to fail and learn what the market is telling us. What value we think we are creating and does the customer see the value as well? This is validating your value-hypothesis, I’m paraphrasing Andy Rachleff.

Second, ensure that customer is going to pay for the product otherwise it’s a nice hobby but not a business. Again test-measure-learn what pricing works, what business model works the best. Subscriptions? Transactional? Bundling with other services? Giving the product away for free in order to grow another north star metric?

Lastly, be clear on user and customer. Are you selling to the end user? Are you giving the product for free to users but charging your partners? Is your user the customer e.g. Netflix subscriber or is your user just a user and your customer is a small business e.g. EventBrite. Understanding this and setting the right priorities to delight both the customer and the user in different ways is important, ignore any one of them at your own peril.

7 Things My Dog Beats Me In

Don’t compromise, ever! – She will never eat food that she doesn’t like even when the food is lying around in the bowl whole day and she has not eaten anything.

Don’t eat if not hungry – She won’t eat food when she is not hungry how ever much you plead or force.

Play like a dog – She always loves to play, in the middle of the night or early in the morning or middle of the day. No questions asked.

Always be cheerful (ABC) – She is happy and cheerful, never a dull moment with her around.

Always greet visitors – She is always the first one to welcome guests into the house and she greets them by playing with them for a minute or two.

Never eat while driving – When we are on a long drive, she never eats any food during the travel. She likes the “less luggage more comfort” policy.

Never get mad – Whatever you do to her, she will never get mad, it’s impossible to make her mad. I’ve had a couple of dogs before and man they get mad when you touch their food bowl, however, this girl is super cool!

Every man has his day, my turn is next. Meanwhile, I might as well enjoy some good music.

Does Everything Happen For Our Own Good?

“He washed his hands and feet, and just as he reached for his boot, an eagle snatched it away! The boot turned upside down as it lifted, and a poisonous snake dropped out. The eagle circled and brought the boot back, saying, “My helpless reverence for you made this necessary…Mohammad thanked the eagle and said, “What I thought was rudeness was really love. You took away my grief, and I was grieved! Learn from this eagle story that when misfortune comes, you must quickly praise. Others may be saying, Oh no, but you will be opening out like a rose losing itself petal by petal….The feeling of joy when sudden disappointment comes, that is Sufism…Don’t grieve for what doesn’t come. Some things that don’t happen keep disasters from happening.” –Rumi

Philosopher and poet Rumi reminds us that everything happens for ones own good. Because when **it hits the fan, it’s hard to believe that anything good can come out of that, **it is not supposed to hit the fan, isn’t it? How does one come to that understanding that everything happens for good?

That understanding comes from faith that there is something better at play than the **it we see and that faith comes from good experiences and good experiences come from a lot of bad experiences i.e. **it hitting the fan.

Lessons From People No Smarter Than You

“If you do the right thing, the right thing will come to you”
Berry Gordy

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable man doesn’t do that; all progress comes from unreasonable people”
G.B. Shaw

“I have yet to meet a scientist who wants to maintain status quo”
Eli Broad

“That urgency, daily drive, that constant self-questioning integral in editing a paper, the ceaseless curiosity, are what I have stood upon every day of my career, taking me and our business further than my young self ever imagined”
Rupert Murdoch

“You seem to be spending a lot of energy on how to be successful. But that is the wrong question. The question is, how to be useful”
Peter Drucker as told to Jim Collins

“When hiring, if forced to choose between virtue and talent, choose virtue. Talented people who lack virtues will do far more damage than virtuous people with lesser talent”
Charles Koch

“I try my best to practice what is known as Shin Zen Bi, Truth, Goodness and Beauty.”
Tadashi Yanai

“The best way to stay ahead is to learn from the younger generation”
Dhanin Chearavanont

Inspiration (PE) To Action (KE)

“Inspiration = Potential Energy (PE) = m. g. h
Action = Kinetic Energy (KE) = 1/2 . m . v(squared)“

It’s easy to get inspired. Open Youtube and you can watch a million inspirational videos, average video is about 15 minutes. If you watch all million videos it would take about 28.5 years of your life. Funny thing is you will still be where you are, no progress. In fact, you will be worse off now because sitting on your ass for that long only could mean bad health, depression and death.

A different approach could be, go get the inspiration from wherever, youtube, a book, gym, running, music or a friend. Get pumped and don’t stop there, it’s pointless if you do, you might have as well sat on your ass eating Cheetos. Go turn that potential energy into kinetic energy, that’s the only reason to ever get inspired. Period. Remember energy can neither be created nor destroyed but can only be transformed. I had to say that, the only thing I remember from that physics class in grade school 🙂

How do you take action, move (velocity), keep going. Do your thing, this is the best time. If you don’t know what your thing is, I doubt it but let’s say you don’t, then do something. Like writing a blog, calling that friend you haven’t called in ages or whatever, don’t let the potential energy dissipate away in frivolous activities.

KE is all about velocity and mass (f/a). Velocity, as I see it, is speed with a sense of direction, keep going with a sense purpose and reach your destination.

Subhashita 3 – Mother And Motherland

अपि स्वर्णमयी लङ्का न मे लक्ष्मण रोचते
जननि जन्म भूमिश्चा स्वर्गादपि गरीयसि //

Api Svarnamayi Lanka Na Me Lakshmana Rochate/
Janani Janmabhumischa Svargadapi Gariyasi //

English translation of the above Sanskrit Subhashita by Prof. S.B. Raghunathacharya, former Vice-Chancellor R.S. Vidyapeet, Tirupati is as follows –

O Lakshmana! I wouldn’t like this city of Lanka, though it is full of gold, because the mother and the birthplace are always greater than even the heavens.

This is a very famous saying of sage Valmiki, after the battle, Lakshmana liked the city of Lanka which was abundant in riches and full of golden structures. Sri Rama advised Lakshmana like this –

O Lakshamana! I consider the mother and the birthplace are greater than the heavens. Indeed nothing can occupy the place of a mother or birthplace, they are matchless.

Lessons From People No Smarter Than You

“Don’t worry about reputation but about character. You should build character by practicing empathy, practicing moral courage, practicing determination.”
Jacqueline Novogratz

“The revolution is going to happen without us. We were sure that software was going to change the world, and we worried that if we didn’t join the digital revolution soon, it would pass us by.”
Bill Gates

“We sometimes fall flat on our face. But people don’t mind people who try things and fall.”
Richard Branson

“Nobody’s job was to say, ‘I think it’s wonderful.”. Instead, I insisted on everyone coming together to analyze potential problems that could lose investor money”
Stephen Schwarzman

“I was fired from Salomon Brothers in 1981 in part because no one at the firm thought much of my idea for computerizing financial data and analysis and presenting it in real time….Organizations resist innovation- and those that do inevitably fail -because people are more comfortable with what they know than with what they don’t….innovation requires hiring smart, creative and driven people, empowering them to take risks and standing behind them…”
Michael Bloomberg

“Don’t think of a specific job, so to speak, or a specific career, like “I’d like to be this” or “I’d like to be that”. You should find an area that interests you and just get on the highway, and it will lead you wherever you lead it.”
Barry Diller

“Making other people happy is a super-happiness….We believe all human beings are entrepreneurs. They are not born to work for somebody else. Their early history is about being hunters, gatherers and problem-solvers. It remained as an essential part of our DNA; we are not job-seekers, we are job creators. Job seeking is a wrong turn in our history.”
Muhammad Yunus

“In a world of unlimited choices and voices, those who can bring people together and tell a good story have power”
Shonda Rhimes

“First 20 years of my career I worked hard to make money. Second 20 years I worked for my ideals. Next 20 years I will work for issues that are my passion…to nurture the next generation so they can make their own contribution to building a better world”
Terry Gou

Don’t Move The Way Fear Makes You Move

“Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to. Don’t try to see through the distances. That’s not for human beings. Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.” —Rumi

Any decision is better than no decision, if you are making them fast enough and course correcting. Action is generally better than inaction, as Rumi points out, just keep walking even when you don’t see where the road is taking you. Many times we get paralyzed by our rational mind and that leads to much inaction.

Dont try to see through distances, I know this very well, having run a few marathons. I’ve found it discouraging to see how far away I was from 26.2 mile marker, instead putting one foot in front of the other was a lot more encouraging. I can do it, any of us can do it, just one step in front of the other.

Instead of looking out for those external mile markers, we can make much more progress looking internally, we can feel more satisfied looking within.

Lastly, fear and love cannot co-exist. If we are driven by fear, our actions, thoughts and words cannot be loving and kind. We cannot be happy or satisfied and we cannot be authentic.

Bikeshedding

“Number of opinions on a topic is exponentially directly proportional to the triviality of the topic”

Source for this blog idea: http://bikeshed.com, I heard about this profound idea from Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame.

Should we use technology X or Y to land the first spaceship carrying humans to Mars?

Opinion 1: Yes to X

Opinion 2: Yes to Y

Opinion 3: May be we should do a combination of X with a small variation on Y.

We are DONE, really no more opinions?

Should we paint this bike shed red or blue?

Opinion 1: Red would be great

Opinion 2: Red sucks

Opinion 3: Red might work but blue would be better

……

Opinion Million: Let’s not paint it

Opinion Million + 1: Do we need a bike shed?

Subhashita 2 – Tomorrow’s Work Today

स्व कार्यं अद्य कुर्वीत

Svah Karyam Adya Kurvita

English translation of the above Sanskrit Subhashita by Prof. S.B. Raghunathacharya, former Vice-Chancellor R.S. Vidyapeet, Tirupati is as follows –

The work to be attended tomorrow, should be done today itself. Generally the human mind postpones important activities indefinitely. Chanakya the author of Arthasastra advises like this –

Don’t postpone anything. Do attend the work planned for tomorrow, today itself.

This type of strategy is more necessary for rulers. They should announce the program for tomorrow and do it in advance today itself, so that there may be no chance for their enemies to spoil it.