Product Habits - Building a high-performance company

Crafting Product Narratives for Enterprise Software

Enterprise software is expensive, so winning customers over often requires crafting a compelling narrative about your product. There are four main motivations for buying decisions: The software makes people more efficient, saves money, makes money, or keeps people from getting fired. If you're building enterprise software, make sure it's clear to potential customers which of these motivations your product will satisfy. 

How Long Does It Take To Build an MVP?

Most MVPs shouldn't take more than three to four months to build. But there are always exceptions. Depending on the type of product you're building, it could take more or less time. This chart will give you a better sense of how much time you should allot to creating your MVP. If you're building an analytics tool or B2B SaaS platform, for instance, prepare to spend more time building your initial product. 

Lessons From Engineers Who Turned Down Job Offers

Kapwing Co-founder and CEO Julia Enthoven said that in the three years they spent recruiting top engineering talent, the company made 36 job offers, and 16 of them turned the company down. This is a great read about the company's lessons from the rejections and how they close candidates now. 

How To Influence Without Authority

So many important business decisions happen when people can lead and influence without direct authority. This is particularly true for a role like product management, where you'll work with many other functions but rarely have direct authority over them. I thought this was an interesting read about how the Atlassian team uses three influence "plays"—and why each is effective.

The Growing Specialization of Product Management

Problems arise when teams assume that all PM roles are created equal. This is a helpful read that aims to define distinct PM specializations. There are four main types of product work—feature, growth, scaling, and PMF expansion—each requiring a specific kind of PM. Read on to learn more about the differences between each one and how you should set role expectations accordingly. 

Marketing to the Right People

One of the most effective (and overlooked) ways to achieve rapid growth is to make sure you're marketing to the right people. In the early stages, this isn't as straightforward as it sounds. All too often, startups try to cast a wide net and end up being distracted or ineffective. Before you invest more energy and money into marketing and sales, it's worth taking time to define an ideal customer profile. Here's how.

How To Utilize Customer Intent Data

Intent data can be beneficial for identifying where a buyer is in the purchasing process—and whether they intend to buy from you at all. If you learn how to use it effectively, intent data can help you personalize the user experience, prioritize leads, engage the right prospects, and encourage customer loyalty. This playbook is a good starting point. 

Why Premature Scaling Fails

I thought this was an illuminating read about what Andrew Chen calls the "traction treadmill." It happens when you try to scale a product with questionable product-market fit. When you lose a percentage of your users quickly but have the budget to keep replacing them, you'll eventually get to a place where your company is running hard just to stay in one place. The key takeaway: Be mindful of trying to fix and scale a product at the same time.