Community Wisdom: Podcast update + prioritizing at an early-stage startup, playbooks for product discovery, demons…
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I hope you like it. If you listen, please send me feedback so I can keep making these better. And if you find it valuable, please leave a rating (literally takes 10 seconds) 🙏 💥 Top threads this week1. Prioritizing at an early-stage startup
Tibi Most of the outcome is in the hands of the leadership. It’s really hard to fight that back past a point, as early-stage usually = founders are hands-on. What I saw brings the hectic feeling of running around and trying everything is an unclear idea of what the vision of the company is, so when a user asks for something when that something faces an unclear vision usually the thinking is that the user will pull you into PMF. The added pressure also comes that early-stage = limited runway so the temptation to do the things that bring money vs the thing that gets you to the next funding round is even higher. B2B is even higher pressure as you’re not talking about a percentage of potential user loss that can be replaced but specific contracts with a limited number of companies than can vanish. Maybe I’m pessimistic or I’m deriving outcomes based on a sample of two, but without leadership support, it’s a lot of fighting against the current. The board usually helps a lot with this in keeping the founders in check. Laura M Matt O’Connell
I’ve used that visual to help paint the story of “What can happen if we focus“ several times. It’s worked well for me so far. Julian Doubly unfortunately, I was in a financial situation which meant I couldn’t immediately resign and go back to the market unemployed even for a short time. I really struggle with product management roles in early-stage companies. I think founders should be responsible for that. I now as a founder I would only hire a product manager once I have product customer fit ( “dozens“ of people / orgs who have completely changed the way they work to use your product instead of a previous method). Otherwise what tends to happen is the product manager ends up being a bunch of different roles — similar it seems to your experienced — project manager, program manager, delivery manager, maybe operations manager. But not the product manager. The product manager role is a delegation of product work either through market penetration (more value from existing customers), market development (more customers), product development (more features, same customer), or diversification (new customers, new features). IMHO they (we in my past) have no place being involved in proving the core proposition of the company. That’s my view anyway. But maybe my bias is that I have good product management skills as a founder as well. And maybe there are founders who have no idea how to build products. Maybe that in itself is a red flag? Laura M 2. Playbook for product discovery
Scott Jeff Jacob Young Jeff Jacob Young Jeff I spend more time here than specific product discovery tho I’d argue it’s a blurry line. Daniel Lee 3. Demonstrating your PM skills to recruiters
Stepa Mitaki For example:
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