A Brilliant Product Strategy Mental Model From Whoop’s Former Head Of Product
A Brilliant Product Strategy Mental Model From Whoop’s Former Head Of Product
The Product Strategy Edition, and achieving Product-Market Fit with your choices
Welcome back to the Upstream Full-Stack Journal, where we go up- and downstream to explore the full Value Delivery stack, from Strategy through OKRs, Product Management, and Agile Systems of Delivery.
In this edition:
A look at a pre-eminent Product thinker’s approach to Product Strategy
The Product-Market Fit Score
It’s GO-Time!
Are you ever confused about product strategy?
As a product person, are you frequently unsure how to prioritize what to build with your team? Are you getting slammed from all sides internally, trying to figure out how to build out everything your internal stakeholders are asking for?
Does your Sales team constantly pressure you, trying to grab every minute of spare engineering capacity? Are you frequently reduced to resorting to some kind of Excel spreadsheet-based prioritization framework like RICE or WSJF, or worse? And on top of all that, has your product growth stalled?
Fortunately, thanks to Ben Foster, in a few simple diagrams, you’ll have a powerful visual metaphor for product strategy and be better able to place your current situation in context.
Meet Ben Foster
Ben Foster has had a stellar product career, working first at eBay under Marty Cagan, and later as Chief Product Officer at WHOOP band through its greatest growth period.
Ben is also the author, with Rajesh Nerlikar, of a truly outstanding product management book: “Build What Matters: Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management.” In that book, Ben and Rajesh introduce many breakthrough concepts from their own experience leading product, as well as their consulting work through their Prodify.group consultancy.
Of the many insights introduced in “Build What Matters,” I consider one of the biggest to be their transformative take on product strategy.
For Ben, there’s a fundamental divide between being sales- and services-driven vs. being a product-driven organization.
A Universe of Potential Strategic Choices for Your Product
Let’s take a product, and show where it might sit in the universe of available customers it could potentially serve by answering the two main questions from the “Playing to Win” strategy framework:
Where will you Play? (WTP) (Personas, Geography, Channels)
How will you Win? (HTW) (How will you differentiate?)
Ben Foster uses this image to represent this customer “map,” with each dot representing the universe of customers a product could potentially serve:
Sales/Service-Driven vs. Product-Driven
For Ben, one big reason many products don’t have a clear, overarching product strategy is they’re predominantly sales- and service-driven.
In sales and service-driven companies, there’s a dominant Sales function led by a strong, experienced, and capable sales team. They may have a “President’s Club” for salespeople and tend to reward them with lavish bonuses and vacations. They’re aggressive, and they focus on closing deals.
Any deal, and the bigger the deal size, the better.
Which is great, but leads to chasing whatever potentially interested customer in whatever vertical the sales team can convince to sign up, which ends up looking something like this:
But to quote Ben, this has far-reaching impact:
“In order to perfectly satisfy every customer’s desires, you would have to deliver a specially tailored solution for each of them, which is exactly what services-driven companies do. Those solutions could be delivered via ongoing services (as a consultancy does) or by delivering bespoke technology solutions, as represented by the squares on the map.”
Foster, Ben; Nerlikar, Rajesh. Build What Matters: Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management (p. 25). Lioncrest Publishing. Kindle Edition.
In a company that’s otherwise trying to be product-driven, while these “bespoke solutions” might provide short-term boosts to the company’s bottom line, or increase the sales team’s overall year-end bonus, as we’ll see below, they may actually be creating costly impact to the product’s long-term viability.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
What a Product-led organization looks like
“A product-driven company takes the exact opposite approach from a services-driven company. They never build a custom solution for an individual customer.”
Foster, Ben; Nerlikar, Rajesh. Build What Matters: Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management (p. 26). Lioncrest Publishing. Kindle Edition.
For Ben, product-led organizations intentionally make a set of consciously thought-out “Where to Play” and “How to Win” choices to come up with a cohesive product strategy.
In this scenario, we could call these conscious “Where to Play?” and “How to Win?” choices “integrated” and consistent, which Ben and Rajesh represent as the product’s “Win Zone,” as shown in this image:
What most Product people get wrong with their Strategy
Forgetting about the end user
Trying to focus only on internal needs is a lost cause.
As we touched on above, when product managers are reduced to prioritizing features using some prioritization framework, there’s clearly a strategy gap at the top. This applies equally for PMs and teams scrambling to build something to satisfy a random customer, the Sales team, or any other internal stakeholders’ “must-have” feature request list.
Externally, when we think of the impact to the product’s end-users, every one of those random feature requests has to be rolled out so users will know what it is and how to use it.
Implications for the organization
The long-term internal impact of a lack of clarity around strategy is equally bad.
Every feature delivered represents more documentation to handle, and Customer Success has to be trained how to use them and talk users through using them. The software team’s lives are now made progressively more complicated, as these features not only have to be maintained and regularly updated, they all add to an ever-increasing mountain of technical debt. Over time, any attempt to add to or extend the product’s codebase gets increasingly unmanageable.
Worse, the user experience impact of satisfying all these wide-ranging demands is products that can feel like a random mix of features jumbled together.
How can we address these go-to-market and technical debt realities while fielding a near-constant stream of internal and customer-focused dissatisfactions with your product?
The first step to becoming product- and strategy-led
For Ben Foster, recognizing you can’t, and shouldn’t try to please everybody is the first step to becoming strategy and product-driven:
“You will never finish building a product that makes every customer in the target market perfectly satisfied. After all, that’s the approach of a services-driven company, not a product-driven company. To avoid unintentionally becoming a services-driven company, you must say no to most product requests.”
Foster, Ben; Nerlikar, Rajesh. Build What Matters: Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management (p. 27). Lioncrest Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Saying “no” for a product person is the first step to becoming strategy- and product-driven.
Find out more about Ben Foster’s approach to Product Strategy, as well as a secret to unlocking growth at far lower cost and effort.
Read the full article here on my personal blog:
Or here via Product Coalition on Medium:
Using The Product-Market Fit Score to Achieve PMF
After reading the above piece, Ben Foster reached out to me to re-emphasize the importance of being Product-led, and referred me to Rahul Vohra’s Product-Market Fit article on First Round Review as a great reference to measure the effectiveness of your matched “Where to Play” and “How to Win” choices.
I’ve summarized some of the essentials of this massive, highly-rewarding read below.
The Engine to Find Product Market Fit
In the process of building the Superhuman email application, user growth had stalled, and Vohra wasn’t sure how to prioritize his roadmap, or who exactly his users were.
He was trying to achieve “Product-Market Fit” (or “PMF”), essentially, fine-tuning his “Where to Play” and “How to Win” choices to provide a differentiated experience to meet his target customer’s unmet needs.
But “Product Market Fit” was fuzzy and undefined. Vohra needed a way to define and measure it, which he did when he came upon the work of Sean Ellis.
Defining PMF Empirically
Ellis, who ran growth for Dropbox, LogMeIn, and Eventbrite, had become obsessed with something that had intrigued him:
“What if you could measure Product-Market Fit?”
After much trial and error, Ellis came up with this flash of insight:
“Ellis had found a leading indicator: just ask users “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measure the percent who answer “very disappointed.”
Rahul Vohra, How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit
The PMF Benchmark
And what was the “magic” benchmark to insure Product-Market Fit viability?
In Sean Ellis’ own words:
“In my experience, achieving product/market fit requires at least 40% of users saying they would be “very disappointed” without your product. Admittedly this threshold is a bit arbitrary, but I defined it after comparing results across nearly 100 startups. Those that struggle for traction are always under 40%, while most that gain strong traction exceed 40%.”
Sean Ellis, “The Startup Pyramid”
Becoming “Superhuman”
Vohra now surveyed his users, and saw that only 22% would be “very disappointed” without his fledgling “Superhuman” app.
From that point, Vohra followed this 4-point plan:
Segment to find your supporters and paint a picture of your high-expectation customers.
Analyze feedback to convert on-the-fence users into fanatics.
Build your roadmap by doubling down on what users love and addressing what holds others back.
Repeat the process and make the product/market fit score the most important metric.
Vohra followed this plan to get Superhuman to 58% of users who would be “very disappointed” without his app, beating even Slack, (which had previously hit an unheard-of 51% mark.).
Rahul Vohra also provides his “PMF Engine” as a really helpful Coda.io (one of my favorite products) doc with sample data you can duplicate and use freely for your own product here.
That’s it for this round!
Join me next time as we continue to go Up- and Downstream to explore the Full Value Delivery Stack.
