Productheads

Power up your product team!
Product recruitment, training and consultancy

[Productheads @productheads]

The SaaS Fire Triangle: 🔥

Sales
/ \
Customer Success - Product

When these teams are well aligned, great things happen.

[Productheads @productheads]

Product teams have a gambling problem

They place bets on features and when they don’t pay off sink more time and money in, worsening the failure

Smart teams constantly check the value:effort ratio and set themselves a walkaway point if they can’t ship the feature by that time

[Productheads @productheads]

Being able to influence as a PM is pretty crucial to your success in the role. We all know how much plate spinning is involved in product management, and this gets 10x harder if you can’t call plays and influence situations to keep everyone focussed.

Here are my essential tips:

[Productheads @productheads]

A sales-led approach can risk your business effectively becoming a consultancy as you sell your time to build features for specific customers.

This behaviour can hide the fact that your product doesn’t have product / market fit yet, or that you’re selling to the wrong people.

[Productheads @productheads]

The most critical thing a PM does is provide and communicate direction and clarity, protecting and nurturing the product towards success in the face of competing forces.

So although other roles are now doing tasks PMs were historically responsible for, the PM is here to stay ✅

[Productheads @productheads]

To succeed in SaaS, you need a sizeable market.

To assess the market, do a top-down and bottom-up market analysis. What is the market size, and how much of that do competitors currently own? How much space is left? Where is the market going, and is there an opportunity for you?

[Productheads @productheads]

The four killers of SaaS companies: 😵

1. Bad/non-existent market (product discovery)
2. Blind faith in an idea (product discovery)
3. Lack of focus in execution (product delivery)
4. Speed of execution (product delivery)

[Productheads @productheads]

50% of features deployed fail to have the intended impact. 😓

Have you got a process to regularly prune these failed experiments? ✂️

Without spring cleaning, your product will bloat, negatively impacting your UX and making it harder to pinpoint problems. 🧐

[Productheads @productheads]

Too much stuff in the backlog? Loads of ideas piling up? Throw more people at it right?

Sadly not!

One of the universal truths of software development is that your dev team will never be big enough…get comfortable with that!

[Productheads @productheads]

The average life span for a first-hire PM in a startup is under 12 months. 🤯

BUT when you load in the person's salary, time, team time, and fees, the figure gets big quickly (some est. in the region of £200k).

Hiring with the right support could make all the difference…

[Productheads @productheads]

https://t.co/EGTQ3LalHp

[Productheads @productheads]

Growth too quickly will cause a world of pain. 😖

If you are still making large course corrections in the product, you want to keep the team as small as possible and force yourself to make everything as quickly as possible until you’ve validated your product and proposition.

[Tim Wilkinson @Tim_S_Wilkinson]

If you are new to a company take the time to learn this stuff by living in the product. Take the sales training, join the CS team for a day every week, and do the market research. Once you’re confident, identify opportunities to prove your knowledge.

[Productheads @productheads]

@jefflash "Sure, we can probably sqeeze that into the sprint"

[Productheads @productheads]

Power up your product team 🚀

[Productheads @productheads]

How do you keep control of your calendar and make sure you have time for creative / strategic work?

[Productheads @productheads]

“A startup is a temporary organization designed to look for a business model that is repeatable and scalable”
(Steve Blank)

[Productheads @productheads]

Simple question... how much stuff from last sprint did you actually complete*? And the sprint before that?

*By 'complete' we mean actually shipped and in the hands of your customers!