(Thanks to Lizzy Morris for these terms @ScrumAlliance)

For beginners in the industry or even as a refresher to those experienced, user research is the foundation of finding out what they want, may need, and what their pain points are.

I find it useful to create as part of my role and environment a hypothesis-driven development approach to my product pipeline. This is a how-to-guide of how I would understand my users, the end-users, and the different types of customers and their touchpoints with my product.

In my experience, sometimes, at more traditional organizations, it’s often quite hard to push on agile practices, within legacy structures, there is bureaucracy where lots of different layers of approvals, and blurred lines of ownership or accountability can be foggy.

If you have walked into an organization where dysfunctional is a normal way of work, (yes they are out there and yes we can get stuck, no matter how good we are), approaching it with a ‘change management hat’ may help you avoid frustration. (It’s helped me!)

Sometimes, we are faced with leaders, that are experts in their field, with more than 25 years in the game and in their industry. The king of the castle, however in the face of the changing landscape of technology, speed of competitiveness, it’s a danger to ever feel comfortable in the driver’s seat and exclaim and shout you know your customers when customers change their behavior rapidly, I like to think that yesterday’s customers are not today’s.

So, proceed with caution (remember to not step on toes, if it will cost you your job) and make sure you do a few change management things to get buy in early on with your stakeholders, a good start can be ‘Introducing Agile to the organization’ workshops, or if you can just jump straight into a design-thinking workshop, do it.

So, for those of you that want to take home a paycheck every month and yet still need to move fast, I relentlessly try every day to change the mindset, in small steps, and sometimes if the organization welcomes it, bigger leaps.

Then here’s a way to start, gaining momentum in User research, create a hypothesis, imagine first then test.

Try the below guideline only if, you are in the following scenarios;

Scenario a) You’re at an organization where your boss, believes they know everything that they need to know about the customer. (proceed with caution)

Scenario b) You’re bootstrapping your business, you don’t have a lot of resources or investment and need to just get stuff done

(Warning: businesses that don’t talk to customers or humans will often more or less, fail, so proceed with caution)

Please note: if your management team is not responsive to the initiative, continue with caution, until you are able to build rapport, respect, and influence, don’t go guns blazing, you might just be on your way out to the exit sooner than later

Congratulations you are the product owner of ‘FindLocal’, you have spoken to your founders and they have explained the strategy and mission of what they want to build and why.

‘As Jason the CEO of ‘FindLocal’ I want to innovate my business model from Catalogue to Online, in niche markets, by launching my own digital products that helps my customers, to find what they need and compare between offers easily, I want to focus on the Florida region and offer Swimming pools as my first vertical, I want to be the price comparison site for these types of products and many more that are currently fragmented and that users don’t have a great experience in yelp or review sites’

Strategy objective: Jason wants to diversify the revenue stream from Catalogue Distribution and Printing to Online.

After meeting with Jason the CEO, as a product owner, the first thing you’re going to do in your new job is to create a positioning statement to understand the business and its goals. You’re going to put yourself at the heart of Jason’s customer and we’re using Tim the founder of a swimming pool buisness that wants to invest in a new form of digital marketing.

1. Creating your Position Statement

Create your positioning statement, this is a statement that introduces the company and the product you’re working on, Jason has disclosed that the product is called “SwimLane”. Framework

[Target Customer] who [opportunity / need / wants], the [product name] is a [description] that [benefits], unlike [competitor/s], our product [provide description of the key differences points]

Examples

Positioning Statement for ‘End Users’ (Business to Consumers)

SwimLane provides families in Florida the opportunity to find & compare swimming pools and prices all in one platform so that customers are able to get multiple quotes in real-time from professional swimming pool companies. Unlike our competitors, we offer our customers several different payment options, for pay as you go, lay-away, and loans to afford their dream pool.

Positioning Statement for ‘Users’ (Business to Business)

SwimLane provides construction companies all over America, to access customers and generate leads for families that want to find & compare swimming pools and prices on one platform. Unlike traditional listings & review platforms online, we help you with a variety of business tools to capture leads, quote your customers easily and provide payment options with major banks, so you’re business is able to be found by qualified homeowners looking to buy and build a swimming pool.

Start exploring your hypothesis by creating and visualizing the persona.

2. Visualize your persona

Put a face to a name, I often find it really helps to visualize my perfect customer, I envision what the user(s) would look like and classified them into job titles to help me imagine and understand who they are and what they do.

Meet Tim O’Shea, he is the founder of the Swimming Pool business and later you’ll meet Toby Price a new homeowner, both personas have different functions, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and goals. So brainstorm away, who is your ideal customer?

3. Setup Interviews with Profiles or Conduct Desk Research

Like any research, you’re going to find these types of users in your user base, if you’re working on a new product, desk research helps before approaching and conducting a focus group. A little tip, I find Social media is a great place to find profiles of your ideal user groups.

If you have a budget for your project, consider outsourcing it, a few great companies to work with are; Morphosis Apps who can help lead and facilitate your user research project. Another alternative is to use self-service platforms such as Userbrain, Respondent, User Interviews and UserZoom.

4. Creating Tim’s story

Begin with the persona’s demographics, age, location, and a description of Tims’s pain point/problems statement. Imagine this if you have to or collect the data from your user research by creating your first Stakeholder interview, in the worst case of scenarios (always avoid if you can) craft this assumption persona out internally by verifying anyone you can get your hands on (hallways, friends, family, colleagues, next-door neighbors) It’s important to try to not create implicit bias when you do your desk research, so talk to humans that are not in your company.

Tim’s Story

“Tim is a founder of a swimming pool company, he has been in business for 20 years building swimming pools across Florida, USA. Tim’s business has been in a decline of some time, due to the pandemic he had mostly relied on print advertising, word of mouth and yelp, he has a website but it has not been up-to-date. Tim needs more new business and lead generation to be able to keep his business running”

5. Find Tim’s Focus

Start zooming into what is important stuff, highlight the stuff that Tim’s is saying that you think is going to be important.

Product:

Swimming pool construction

Location: Florida, USA

Pain Point:

Marketing & Advertising isn’t generating new business & leads

The revenue decline in Pandemic

Goal:

Higher volume of Lead Generation, to convert and increase the revenue of the new business

6. Define Tim’s Customer

We’re going to do the exact same exercise, however, this time, let’s try with finding out information of who is Tim’s customers are and what their pain points might be.

“Toby is married and has a 4-year-old son, he is expecting a second child on the way, he has just bought a new home in Fleming Island, Florida, after moving from an apartment in downtown, Toby works as a systems architect at a firm, he is looking for an 8ft swimming pool with a gated area to keep his family safe in his 3-bedroom property, he is having a hard time comparing pool prices and wants to make a decision based on quality, price, value, and warranties”

Product:

8ft’ Swimming pool construction

Location: Fleming Island, Florida, USA

Pain Point:

Unable to make a decision, feels difficulty in researching pools.

Goal:

Wants to be able to easily see a list to compare pool options

Buy an 8 ft swimming pool with quality, good value, and a warranty

Wants to feel safe

7. Defining the problem

So it’s time to formulate the idea into a business model canvas, let’s explore how we can brainstorm this, ask questions, remember everything can be validated with data, real users, and a product.

Key Assumption

“Tim wants to generate leads, at a high level what kind of service or product should we provide Tim and what type of product does Toby need to be able to compare pool prices and buy a swimming pool?”

8. Create your Business model canvas to find your value propositions!

The Business model canvas provides a quick draft of all the areas you need to explore the strategy and develop an MVP.

Remember an MVP must perform, if the goal is transactions, you will need a payment gateway or a way to pay, if the goal is traffic and leads, you will need a contact form and a way to generate traffic. Download the official business model canvas for free here. Here is my example of starting the business model canvas, if the teams that you are working with are new to the Business model canvas, use this canvas as a way to collaborate together, which will help you with agreement and commitment to the initiative. If they are not receptive, that’s a totally different problem altogether and I will in a later post and provide strategies on how I have influenced my technical or founding teams.

9. Design your solution for your product by breaking down your first EPIC and its stories

For those of you new to creating Epics, I like to think that an epic is a really high-level description of your user’s problem, it’s a large but concise explanation of the issue the user is facing and it can be broken down into child user stories or a series of stories.

So for Tim’s Swimlane’s product, we can brainstorm the type of initiatives we could hypothesize to draw up a bit of a charter to the project.

We want to explore what are the personas, jobs-to-be-done, the demand, and value analysis probably go into the usability hypothesis and then finally to finish the functional hypothesis.

(I will create a separate how-to on go-to-market, disruption, and innovating later down the track, but stay with me here if you are new to the world of UX and product development)

An example of an EPIC

‘As Tim the CEO of Swimlane, I want my customers to know that I have the lowest price and the best quality for swimming pools in the Florida region so that I can increase my leads and win new business online.’

Strategy objective: Address the customer’s pain point.

What are you hearing that Tim wants?

‘As Tim the CEO of Swimlane, I want to offer quotations to customers online, when they ask for it and provide them with a variety of different ways to pay, so they are able to make a decision without further objections’

Strategy objective: Leverage a niche industry to approach partnerships with big banks, offer on-the-spot, easy to use and real-time tools to create quotes.

‘As Tim the CEO of Swimlane, I want to spend my advertising dollars more effectively online, so that I can generate qualified leads without wasting money

Strategy objective: Invest in qualified advertising products, to decrease ad-spend YoY

It’s traditionally not part of the Epic to address your strategic objective as I did above, I find it meaningful to keep things in check and it helps me train my muscles of strategic thinking so that I can create value for the organization I work with.

The Company Strategy provides context to the Business objectives which then, help me Define Sprint goals and the key metrics to be successful in my role as a product owner. This way when I talk to my engineering team and my developers, they understand why we are doing things and why they are important and what value will the product create for the company.

Ask questions about what product success looks like?

‘What type of numbers do I need to show so that I understand that my product is successful’

Hard numbers, don’t lie, so to measure success (even early ones), establish what type of metrics you need to measure in order to be successful with the product;

Is it the amount of money your product makes by its users, is what numbers are important, will it be traffic, is it the time they spend, where they are dropping out, did they complete a journey of signing up to your service, and how many purchases did you get from the people that click to buy or enquire?

When you don’t have a clear set of metrics, to measure your product, you’re not going to be able to clearly go from stage 1 to stage 2, sometimes the gut works, you have a wonderful idea, everyone wants it, that’s what they say, and you’re confident that you know it will succeed, it’s ok to be positive and optimistic, my advice is to keep your head and heart in check with clear and precise goals and don’t be afraid to walk in that door and ask management what their goals are to then circle back around and apply it to the product.

No matter what industry/product I have been working on, every action a user takes is either a buying response or a non-buying response.

10. Design a storyboard

When you have written your EPIC story, create the storyboard this helps with identifying the overall most important steps or milestones that need to happen for your perfect

‘Happy Path’.

Key takeaways: Always be asking…

‘What does my customer need to do today, to get what they want and purchase tomorrow?

The key to a successful product is getting clarity, creating goals to measure success, and launching a product that addresses the immediate need of the customers today and those of tomorrow.

These 10 steps may seem quite comprehensive and take more time than just going with it when I practiced it, it helps me create a clearer picture and provided structured experiments to formulate my hypothesis, it has also helped me get alignment from business to my team and encourage an agile-friendly workplace with incorporating the hypothesis-driven design.

Thanks for reading, I’m going to be writing over these few months and try to get everything I have learned in this blog so stay tuned and visit at a future date for new stories on Product Development and Venture building.

As Product Owners, we simply must make our problems known, and often enough we have round-table meetings with our C-suites and management where a complaint is addressed. In the below examples, I mocked up a product complaint that I once heard from my management team as an exercise for this spotlight. (Disclaimer: The below are examples only)

Be transparent when telling the ‘why’

I like writing my key problems in the form of EPIC stories, here are my examples and a way you could approach them too.

The initiative ‘We need to increase our activation rate, it’s stagnant and falling behind & we need fresh solutions’

Primarily speaking, most of the time, you would already measure the progress of a product, at some companies, you would have the visibility of the key metrics of a product and how users use its features. So, we’re going to use the above example as a way to understand how to apply.

Gather intel by asking questions around you

Let’s say that you have been averaging on a flat growth % MoM, and marketing has spent more than double their efforts in traffic, but the conversion is just not happening on the activation. So how do you begin, questions of is this a marketing issue or is this a product issue must be addressed and honestly answered.

Did they change their tactic, recipe, audience targeting if not and qualified audiences are going to your application but not converting as they use, then you need to throw in some excitement to the product.

Write your problem statement

Let’s throw in the problem statement to provide some framework and context to the task.

The Problem Statement ‘Our product is stagnant, our users don’t activate an account straight away, they are offered discounts and they still don’t bite’

Kick-off a design sprint

So, the tactic of offering discounts, is not working, what can you do now, how do you explore a key fundamental problem as a product manager and how do you implement this in this practice of agile to get to what users are really thinking? It’s probably time to plan a design sprint to kick-off your ideation in order to help you iterate to find valuable outcomes for the user and address the key problems of growth.

Synthesize your design sprint findings

‘We found that a competitor is undercutting us and creating better discount offers with our product, we could discount and we could also develop a better way to keep them by releasing a new feature’

That’s definitely one way to counter-attack, but trust me you don’t want to go into a price war unless you significantly can and own the market, but until then, lowering price may not be an option, but differentiating what you offer and offering more could be with releasing new features.

This is just a hypothesis of a quick problem I have encountered in the past, so it’s not the holy grail of approaches and the best way to figure it all out is to conduct another round of user interviews, to find out what key users want to see more of, what non-users would purchase, remember that customers will always say what they want, but not often necessarily pay for a product or use a feature just because they thought it’s a good idea, but what you can do is get closer to understand the market needs and validating it quickly.

Conduct user interviews

I want to be able to listen to my subscription offline, when I’m not using the internet, so that I don’t have to use data’

Case study: Spotify

In this scenario, we’re taking the leap into the world of online streaming, it took a while for Spotify to release its download for the offline features.

Spotify: Testing the market

Spotify released the feature in March of 2009, where they began offering music downloads to a select few countries, in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. My hunch was that in doing so, they wanted to see if ‘downloading’ music and paying for it will be a performer to the product, unfortunately, it didn’t work out too well, with the feature removed a mere 3 years later, in 2013, Users could purchase tracks from Spotify, which partnered with 7digital to incorporate the feature. The ability to purchase and download music tracks via the app was removed on 4 January 2013. A lot of people complained, but also a lot of people didn’t use this feature, some features just don’t stick after a few years, the market trends or behavior of a user and their preferences, changes and it’s up to you as a product owner to ensure you listen to these changes and keep a close check on what competitors or similar services are doing.

Spotify’s relentless experiments paid off, some didn’t

Spotify decided that there were a few issues to tackle, could they have limits to free in order to convert to paid?

They brought out, a feature to address free users, limiting listening experiences which impose a penalty and can drawback negative or positive monetization strategy, the risk of losing the users were high and free users were limited to 10 hours of playback, they removed this eventually and started different strategies in a bid to win the free user base and year on year, the offer has been more and more favorable to giving free users what they want whilst making sure paid users were always excited.

Spotify included the listen to offline feature, and this was brilliant, following in the footsteps of Netflix whereas as a paying subscriber, you can download your favorite tv shows to watch whenever you don’t have access to data, which was a godsend to customers. They got here only because they were transparent in their efforts, agile, and were not afraid to experiment with a variety of solutions in order for the right one to stick. To this day Spotify and its teams are self-organizing, accountable, and are in abundance of great ideas where they want to keep on innovating and I admire them for their relentless pursuit of keeping the customer and their artists happy.

Ethos of teams

In agile practices and communities, the team is the center point, agile communities swoon over the ethos of the team, and fixate that this is the driving force of happiness and performance, although the manifesto, begins with ‘Individuals’, it does not begin with Teams. Highly popularized by Agile culture, ‘Self-organizing teams’ where a team can be self-organizing in some ways of work, but in others are simply not. Agile coaches discourage any kind of individual recognition and in their practice, only a team should be recognized for its success.

Everyone is equal and anyone can do it!

What Agile practitioners fail to recognize is the consideration of people and that they are in fact, individuals with motivations, desires, interests, and of course, demands. In Agile, the theory of advocating that everyone is equal and anyone can work on anything mindset, for me, this transcend to anything but chaos for a startup, a small medium-sized company, or even the larger corporations beginning their transformation journey. If we add in the mix of Technical competence, it’ is impossible to say that anyone can work on anything and everyone is equal.

Engineering a nuclear powerplant anyone?

Imagine managing resources and putting your best engineers to work at a nuclear power plant who are in fact qualified for the task at hand, you would think that this is a no-brainer, and is mandatory, yet promoting agile, where everyone is equal and anyone can work on anything mindset, creates numbness in practical implementation, in reality, following this principle if we use the same example, imagine putting someone that is ill-qualified into a nuclear powerplant and getting to solve a rather complex set of problems with the array of other individuals in the group that can guide, may just not be the smartest thing to do, my mind speaks chaos when I think of this hypothetical.

Agile is not one way or other, there are lots of grey areas, of the guideline and should only be used as a guideline, to stimulate rapid yet value-driven software development.

Who are the leaders in an Agile team?

In Agile, leadership in a team is usually designated to the Scrum Master, their role is to keep the peace and to facilitate by removing barriers, shielding, ensuring that practices of scrum are met, coaching removing impediments to the development teams.

Mindset on Servant leadership

The Scrum Master acts as the Team Leader, but what we fail to understand is even though the notion of the Scrum master’s role is to be a servant leader for the scrum team, we fail to realize that they have very little authority over anything besides from ensuring the practice of scrum. So out the window, Authority and power, negotiating on the teams’ behalf can and usually be done by non-other the other inside person in the team and that’s with the Product Owner, where brokering deals might be prevalent in some people where others are not.

The Product Owner provides product leadership

I always like to think of the role as a product owner and the expectations of what this means of being a product leader at the same time; the Product Owner is a person of action that works inside the team and a person of action outside the team, in a large organization with multiple teams and multiple products, you might be the product manager of a lot of different products at the same time, yes, this has happened to me and within navigating large structures, approvals and sign-offs are key yet bargaining and negotiating is a must-have skill set to influence your way with departments, managers and executives.

Fragmented leadership

Sometimes, the roles defined in this organization and the responsibilities required to fulfill them, like accountability or ownership in meeting time, deliverables, and valuable outcomes, can become highly conflicting, managers want one thing, developers want another, the scrum master serves the team, without high visibility in company mandates and the product owner is the one that focuses on the customer, fragmented.

Degrees of Leadership and Authority

Having leaders that are available to help teams resolve conflicts is essential and conflict is a natural process of business, yet leadership requires explicit authority, and whilst respect is mutually equal and equality is the state of mind, decision making is not. The degrees of authority and the importance of influencing, challenging, and delegating are all parts of formal or informal forms of power.

Individual contribution matters as much as the team contribution

I believe that contribution from the team and contribution of individuals is what I like to recognize, although as a Product Owner, often my responsibilities of team development and coaching is not officially what a Product Owner does nor is it my responsibility to chime in a do so, and yet I systematically always fall into this and typically end up coaching them for far greater hiatus on career development, conflict resolution or self-improvement.

People are individuals and the team is the group, it is important to recognize that individual contribution is as important to the team’s collective contribution. Recognition and personal accountability, and personal ownership is key to successful team operations, without this, we won’t be able to have or achieve ‘self-organizing but before this can happen.

Key Takeaways
Product leaders need to partner with organizational members and scrum masters, to ensure that the right people are doing their best work and they remain happy, what I do believe is there is no one-size-fits-all set of values or practices what I want to believe is that leadership no matter to the role, is a directive, with authority, empowerment, praise, critical feedback, and collaboration and that as great as Agile is to implement, there are just a few more key points to add into the manifesto and I hope that the community is open to enhancing its guiding principles to include individual contributions and empowerment with authority.

Hiring a Product owner for the first time can be daunting! If you’re a startup going to scale up, a little tip to think ask first is ‘Will I as the founder of the product, be able to trust someone to do a better job than I did’ transitioning requires change and change can be scary. If it’s a digital transformation role and a product owner is included, a good frame is to ask, does the organization have the basics in place to ensure the PO can work in their chosen methodology, it might mean that you might now even have a development culture or a framework you are using to release software.

What do Product Owners do?

I like to think that the role of a product owner is to be responsible for maximizing the value of the product.

They are great communicators, can be extroverted or introverted. They are effective and clear as glass in translating business talk into talk that engineers understand and most tend to have the decision power and or authority to decide what key features go into the product and be the bridge between business, design & engineering teams.

Do Product Owners have complete authority over the product?

There are many different takes and honestly, I think there are no right or wrong answers, but maybe as a Product Owner, I want to make sure I can still take home a paycheck or get hired. In its truest form Product owners are the single point of contact, they are the 1 person in an organization and they are not really a ‘committee’ although organizations behave around a Product owner like decisions are a committee, just be upfront about what works for you and your organization.

As naive as that sounds, true product owners are the cream of the crop and an express to c-suite lounge, with the big guns, if they have pure authority and the backbone of business understanding coupled with putting the user front and center and finishing off with the icing of technical speak, it’s a talent that few and far companies can aspire to get. They are the ones that are working in the big giants, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, and so on, but they all got there from different diverse backgrounds, BA related, tech lead-related, design-lead related and even had many points in time where they were just product managers, that started with a company much like yours and team size probably similar with very little ownership, but throughout their career, they received the trust, authority, empowerment, and guidance and they are there where they are today simply because of talent & ownership.

So.. If the Product Owner owns the product, then what do I do?

Product owners a central part of the product it’s customers and the organization. That means you need support, buy-in, influence, and great rapport with your peers. The art of managing up is an absolute must-have skill to own.

Many companies have had trouble defining the type of true authority and most companies don’t often understand that the product owner simply owns the product no matter who is in the chain of command, sorry in advance if this is blunt, but let’s be clear a product can be a part of a feature on a platform and you still have to report to the many different layers of command in a senior product team eg; Head of product, Chief of Product or Group Product owner.

This also doesn’t mean that you cannot find a Product owner that has the flexibility, but really think of empowering the product owner or at least ensure that you are defining clear authority levels within your reporting lines.

A story that happened to me,

I once worked at a startup that just closed its Series A, they were on the path from startup to scale up. The founders were amazing, inspirational, positive, motivated, and the people were exceptional especially the business team.

The company was structured remotely, with an asynchronous style of communication and although the relationship started off with all smiles and happiness, it turned really toxic really fasts, smiles became frowns, and being remote you can’t hide from the camera!

I constantly felt at every meeting, I didn’t own the product and I’m not alone. In a recent virtual conference for product owners, more than 60 participants from Asia and an instructor who was based in the US, made clear points that lack of empowerment in the Product owner role was a contribution to unhappiness at work, its true that the basic design of a Product Owner needs ownership but that’s not practical at some organizations, it’s shared, a collective and a committee.

It’s OKAY, to be this type of company, like I said there is no right or wrong, but it is simply not okay to micromanage, panic on every weekend of progress and it’s not ok to specifically ‘specify requirements or take screenshots and say I want it like this. Control is hard to give up and accountability being a founder is also difficult to give up, but focus on the business is a 100% full-time role, just like focusing on the product is a 100% full-time role.

So before your hire a product owner and start scaling your team, please define your structure or at least, give the PO and the team the authority to define the structure.

Red Flag 1 — No Scrum no play, there was no scrum or no methodology.

Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations, generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems and Scrum theory is the empiricism of the 3 pillars, transparency, Inspection, Adaptation, Scrum helps organizations focus on improving the product, help teams communicate in person in the office and also remotely, every day during standup.

Red Flag 2 — Micromanagement

Sometimes tickets were just added to the active sprint, because ‘we had to do it, the boss said so. If you’re the type of founder or you work in the team that has this input, it’s important to make it clear to the hire that is part of the company’s successful culture. Some business cultures in Asia rely on micromanagement in everything they do and are siloed or pyramids with a paternalistic way of management, it works, they are billion-dollar companies and it’s a way of life for them. But please define the lines of authority and sign-off, the worst thing is a newly hired Product owner who exercises decision power, that gets shot down.

Red Flag 3 — Hubris

“I’ve been in buisness for 25 years I know what my customers want”

Oh red flag, be open. You might have the experience and season, but we are only just 1 person and we don’t represent all customers from all walks of life. So, be open to someone else telling you about what the customer wants and the user’s pain points or gains. Learn and unclear, if the culture at your company is that you do things a certain way, and you’re not open, then rethink the role of a product owner and just get a project manager with BI skills, it could just be what you want and need.

Don’t fall for the Hubris

‘At no point as a leader that you would be arrogant enough to know everything about your product or your customer’

Red Flag 4 — Cutting Corners leads to tremendous technical debt.

Ok so scaling up we need to cut corners, sometimes the need to A/B test features, landing pages, or functions helps iterate and come up with a final decision on what goes into the product when we apply methods of design thinking into the mix of a product owner’s priority roadmap. But Cutting corners is speedy, yet dangerous, I once worked with a founder that would let their developers and themselves change to add stuff in the database, enums no big deal, at any point of time, fields of customer data would break, a comma here and a something there it’s a needle in a haystack if you cut corners and it leads to terrible outcomes.

I’m not saying cutting corners is bad, it’s good for certain initiatives but it’s really bad for others, so if you are at a place where scaling up your startup has been messy and the board is full of technical cards of debt, maybe now is not the right time for hiring a Product owner, maybe now is the right time to hire a Head of Engineer, Security Ops, more developers to just get all this stuff refactored, nicely packaged and artifact in place.

No Product owner should work on bugs from the past, on hot potatoes, it’s painful and unexpectedly part of the job, but really decide on what kind of responsibility they have if 50% of their time is going into translating edge cases that just doesn’t happen and usability or logic issues that are not bugs found by customers but found by you, are you moving the product meter, the question to always remind yourself is ‘What is the opportunity cost, if I work less on this and more on that..”

Being nimble are the trades of everyday work and there is an amount of technical debt that starts to accumulate over time and within each release, whether refactoring is required, or more maintenance, there needs to be a balance in quality assurance and product exciters.

‘Cutting corners accumulated so much of technical debt measured more than a balanced amount of ‘gains, pains and jobs-to-be-done, that the company will spend more money to reduce the pain then to conduct the pleasure’

Red Flag 4 — Teamwork

Implementing your first framework for development or employing the start of your engineering team with a few developers, it’s a great imperative to decide what kind of methodology do you want to employ, if the waterfall is important for you and your clients as an agency or if you’re a consumer/business-facing application still trying to find product-market fit, maybe agile could be the winner.

Agile practices is not an individual sport, yet individual contribution is really important and Agile practitioners will argue that the defined structure of the team and how it operates in an Agile environment is important, although teams are fully functional to adopt Agile and may succeed, don’t misunderstand that people are people and people tend to have individualistic needs, not all people work the same either, so in the collective group made up of individuals, everyone must contribute and if they don’t then, that’s something that needs open dialogue, rather than closed.

Agile and even waterfall in its core is a team sport a ‘We sport’. Getting downstream requirements and upstream of initiatives is an everyday plight for a product owner, so whatever method you employ, be honest about the level of teamwork the role involves.

If your team are a bunch of individuals that say “I” rather than “We” there’s going to be some rough weather, so Scrum is a good start and there is no better way than starting scrum by just implementing one part of the methodology which is the retrospectives, start from the end and focus on the ‘let’s discuss when went well during this release if you don’t have sprints yet’ and if teams need to be brought together, ice-breaking with the therapeutic elements of a retrospective with engineers is a great starting point, you can opt to do demos or even planning next or jump in and fully go into the scrum, but lead the change, adopt a method and find something works for you, later on, you can evolve your methods and address not only retrospectives and what went well but even slot in breaks in between sprints where openness on challenging the status quo, of your systems, processes, logic, and designs can be entered upon, Scrum is a guideline and a very good one, but blindly following scrum to tee, can lead to things that are unforeseen where dialogue outside the scrum structure is required at times to fundamentally hit that continuous improvement goal.

Now let’s decide together what are the Pros & Cons of the Role, as a founder, how do you trust your baby with a stranger?

Use the six-thinking hat to help you decide what you think you want out of the hire as a founder or business owner, remember as candidates on the lookout to switch roles, we want to believe and we want to be empowered and inspired by you, so the decision is key and reminding you that the decision you will finalize to stick to it. With all scale-up teams, it comes with pains and gains, but that’s the beauty of big organization and efficiency, structure.

So try it out see if you believe it’s time for the next phase in hiring a product owner to help you execute your vision.

Six Thinking Hat

As a founder or business owner, it’s important to establish and identify the ‘Why’ do you need a Product owner, here is a quick easy exercise six-thinking hat principle to help make your decision easier.

White hat

What are the facts of why you need this role?

“Slow product releases, skills gaps, focusing on bringing new customers/clients”

Whatever the reason, you must establish the facts, for why you want this role.

Red Hat

How do I feel about hiring a product owner?

“Relief, Excitement and organized”

Yellow Hat

What are benefits does this role provide to me, my team, and my organization?

“Faster release, fill the skill gaps, provide formal structure, learnings’

Green Hat

What kind of creativity will a product manager bring to the table?

“ usually features a.. feature b.. features c.. we can be x..”

Blue Hat

What do we need to get this role?

“Create the organization chart, distribute this to your team and present the new role and the responsibilities, clearly define the KPI’s and goals of how this person is able to succeed in the job for it to make a difference .”

Help your newly hired Product Owner integrate and adjust well with the team, praise works.

Before appointing the owner of the product, create a vote or get behind it, if your team is hesitant to move into the structure, or lacks experience in practicing agile, it is up to you to encourage and install habits of agile. We all need to learn, adapt and grow a bit. So don’t be afraid, do it, and 6 months down the line, they will thank you for it.

Take yourself out of the equation, the product will not suffer!

With the right discipline and training, a true product owner is one that listens to customers, acts on the quantitative data of user interactions and the measurement of success for a product owner is never getting the product into a decline and one that takes your guidance, advice, and mentorship seriously.

Product owners are the ones that are forever making sure that your product stays relevant and competitive by transparency, inspections, and adaptations, when you trust the right type of talent and find the ideal candidate that fits within your business, there will only be upsides to your growth. Look forward to the discoveries made by teams with Product owners and their ways to delight the customers. When you have happy people and happy customers, you have a happy business.

Don’t forget you’re the inspiring figurehead, your goals are different from the product owner’s goals and at a high level they sync up with your business strategy, speaking with your vision will help foster creativity and innovative solutions from product owners, so take the time to provide business context on what is important strategically, what’s going to move the meter and what is a delight to your customer.

How many times have you heard a leader say; something along the lines of;

‘We’re a laid back, a bunch of people, we value culture and diversity, we bring fun and happiness to the workplace and we’re a family,

Only to find out 1 week into the new job, its seems different to what they have said in the interview, people don’t say good morning, they don’t seem too interested in getting to know you and it feels like you are a ghost in a new town.

How many times are we as leaders guilty of pitching to high-talent on how great our culture is, but we don’t walk the talk?

At this moment of the covid-19 pandemic, where stress and the question of work/life balance are voiced in the engineering community I’m in, is at an all-time high. I find that every other day talented people in my Linkedin network have resigned. The United States reported only this year a total of 11.9 million people quit their jobs. The opportunity for change is right now.

The warning of the great mass exodus of resignations we have seen this year as quoted by Anthony Klotz’s prognostication that “the great resignation is coming”.”Klotz contends, “When there’s uncertainty, people tend to stay put, so there are pent-up resignations that didn’t happen over the past year.” This should lead to a mass exodus of workers leaving their companies for greener pastures with better opportunities.(Forbes, 2021)

If companies and startups don’t pay attention to culture, people will burn out fast and ultimately, money is lost through HR and business interruption and your good people leave.

Is there a definition of what Culture is and how do we practice it?

Is culture the way people act, say, do, is it their beliefs, commitments, mindset? or is it a framework of values? I believe, that culture when implemented correctly provides happy people and a happy organization. It sounds simple, yet great culture is hard it’s a continuous effort and it does remind me of society. Resembling closer to where culture is the way where people have alignment in thinking, with customs, rules, even at times hierarchy, the actions, the mannerisms, and the expectation induce a sense culture and belonging. Sometimes I feel that companies forget that culture is governed by the thoughts and actions of others.

Happiness in itself is not the answer to good culture, happy performance is the answer to good culture and in my time, keeping people happy, that don’t perform is dangerous, the fact that organizational culture exists is to get the best out of the people in turn to make the business a performing business.

Building good culture stems from good leadership. I’ve seen and experienced leaders talk about culture and to be honest, I’m surprised as to how often it is misguided and misunderstood by them. What I have seen are leaders that understand how to be contagious in their culture, the walking breathing example of culture only works if you have enough people in your team that is aligned with your attitude and then the water trickles down. Imagine a waterfall, where water is gushing down to a riverbed, some foundations are completely submerged whilst others remain dry, so think of the culture at your company, as lame as this analogy may sound, a waterfall.

Everything has undoubtedly a place and a system. Some systems are naturally easy to administer whilst others are not. The question is what to do about it and where to look?

Within companies, the practice of organizational behavior relies on 5 disciplines, theoretically, these are broken down to psychology, social psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science, much the same as our thinking in our place and heritage in the world. In practice, shaping and mobilizing OB is a lot harder and in my belief defining the value system and the principal is what brings it to reality.

But how do we start one? Is it enough just to say what we want to be, what problems we want to fix?

It took me many failed attempts, experiments, and mistakes to know what leadership style I wanted to develop and adapt to be effective and of course happy. Let’s not kid ourselves, we can be the best versions of ourselves, embrace and adopt change, be open, direct, and effective but many of these things we may do and execute, if we’re not in the right environment that embraces this, it is not us, it’s the culture that exists there.

Where you thrive in one company you can fail at the next, but what is important to keep in mind is that, if you are hired to grow people, product and process, yet your organisation doesn’t align with this plan, you’re in the wrong place.

I often feel that sometimes, people are afraid to talk about challenges and the road to implementing positive organizational change. and truthfully there is no success, only a bittersweet road to shifting mindsets and if not, often enough restructuring is required. Strong processes are followed by some, yet fail with others, what is the cause is it the process or is it the people? To say at the very least of the challenge ahead culture has always been about people.

Positive culture also does not mean that you are making everyone happy, positive culture can mean that you disagree with ideas that are contributed by the team but still respect them and their contribution, but how do we do this if we are faced with resistance to change and a lack of participation, where polite resilience is not enough to be effective.

People generally don’t know what they don’t know, so If there’s no framework to help them, let the tension out, ask them why(s), get to the bottom of things, install accountability.

If leaders are not accountable for their own mistakes and repeatedly cause negligence to a business that suffers in loss of talent, loss of revenues, and stalls its own releases, it’s an impending crack that gets bigger and bigger every time. It’s not going to fix itself and building a strong culture that helps strategy to be executed heavily relies on the people on the team.

Hedging and blaming is not the answer yet negligence needs consequences. You are in a rock and a hard place, so what are the tactics you can do to employ that integrate expectations as a form of organizational culture?

Let’s begin the exercise by identifying the “Mission”

This is a simple statement, that defines the start of all cultures.

Let’s inspect two possible mission statements and the outcomes, we’re using Google as an example;

Example Mission Statement

“We want to be the #1 search engine in the world for businesses’

Google’s Real Mission Statement

“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” — Google

(read more on Google 10 things philosophy)

You will notice the difference that Google is aware of what they are doing and why they are doing it.

Define your value system, so how do we attach a set of principles to enable greatness?

Let’s practice with the following general statements;

The Statement:

What do you want to achieve?

Value Principal 1. ‘We want our people to feel empowered every day they come to work’

A culture is a ceremonial process, and it does not mean that because you say it as a leader that other people will practice it.

Explore the different ways to start a change by asking;

‘How will you get there?’

Example a) We empower our leaders by providing them a budget where they make the decisions on who they hire for their teams.

Example a) We empower our people, by providing them a platform to share ideas

What do you need to execute this?

What I’ve often done, is at the start of the quarter or the talent’s first day, provide them the budget template, give them the freedom of expressing their ideas, how can make changes, where they would want to increase and grow vs where they want to decrease and save. They will own this, so let them own it and give them the tools to do so.

Come to the self-realization that when ideas are drip-fed, by management, the result is preventing innovation breakthroughs.

Start with ‘What do you want

Value Principal 2. ‘We want our people to give their best every day’

Establish a system that provides people the transparency to bring their best every day,

Implementing tools such as credit, provide shout-outs, and even formally arranging OKRs all work a gem in getting people to react to expectations, the key takeaway, is to set the expectation.

Address the statement with ‘How will you get there

a) We bring our best every day, by enhancing the way we talk to each other, filling in gaps, and documenting our learnings.

b) We bring our best every day by implementing technology incrementally, testing and adapting to our users, and validating our hypothesis. We are open to learn and unlearn, we value making mistakes.

Finish with what do you need to execute this, explore as many objectives as possible that the organization has implemented, and bring them to light.

• Adopting scrum methodology to ensure a ceremonial process of communication
• Ensuring that when features are released, incidents happen, clear and concise documentation is available for all staff.
• Investing in the right tools for data and transparency
• Creating a value system of mistakes, that mistake happens for a good reason and implementing the process of ‘What did you learn for mistakes’
• Creating clear KPIs or agreed on goal agreements in the 1st week of your hires, resonates with transparency on what ‘Bringing the best will translate to’

In my 20’s I worked for an inspiring efficiency-led team and boss, my ex-boss came up with a beautifully simple acronym, to address mistakes and incident handling and I practice this in every organization I’m in.

The Acronym

P-Please

F-Find

R-Root

C-Cause

P-Prevent

R-Reoccurrence

Creating a system that values, mistakes, and values efficiency. The acronym reminded people to document incidents and empowered them to come up with solutions. Simple and rewarding., everyday employees are able to make an impact on process changes, I like to think of this as all the rowers in the boat, they are all rowing to the same drum of the beat, and effectively, they don’t lose their rhythm and pace and get one step closer to their destination.

Value Principal 3. ‘We want to delight our customers and build awesome stuff’

Delighting customers require transparency, at the same, your people need to know what is awesome, don’t through the word awesome around loosely, use it as a reward.

Execution

We want to delight our customers by giving them features they want and need, we do this by asking for their feedback, listening to what they want, and implementing what they need.

• To delight customers, be transparent on what your customers think, feel, say and do, putting users front and center in your organization helps you execute ‘delight’
• Establish a clear KPI sheet, this could be shared with your growers and harvesters and if people know how to quantify the success metrics, they know how to delight and keep keeping customers happy.

Execution

We want our people to build awesome stuff, we do this by employing [x] and using the [x] tools to get the quality and assurance our customers need.

• In the same way, as we communicate top-line KPIs, we’re going to communicate bottom line KPI’s, what makes the product awesome, is its speed, uptime, integration time, release, and cost of the build?

In the end, there are plenty of ways to express the culture of the organization, but doing so, is a discipline that will require structure, adaptation, and being open to trying new things. It’s never too early to start.

“I have been in this industry for 25 years, I know my customer’

Hubris as we know it is an impediment to growth at legacy organizations, studies have found that recourse to hubris as an explanation for organizational failure particular in industries like financial services, and we have seen examples of hubris during the dot-com bubble, in today’s landscape, we’re faced with inflated valuations, hyper-growth trends where products are developed and released, yet pertain no real business models and are simply not sustainable.

CEOs must lead from the front and engage in a relentless fight against corporate hubris, whether this manifests in greed or most commonly denial of the hard realities of the world.

As Product Owners, we’re in this fight too, sometimes with ourselves and or the people around us, our stakeholders.

In my experience, here are the warnings signs of corporate hubris that will eat away at strategy and product development if not kept in check.

Arrogance

Don’t mistake confidence for arrogance, recognize if there are egos around you, and if you’re the one falling into hubris, keep your own ego in check, being confident is something that means that you have the facts and figures to back your findings, but when you fall into your own ego, arrogance will shine through and that won’t win you influence or get productive outcomes. When you’re not humble with your opinions and your suggestions, you might start to get in the way of believing your own bias, so trust yourself, but verify.

Misalignment on Strategy

Having a strategy, is a plan and it’s better than no plan at all, however, if we’re reciting our strategy but actually do not have the means, structure, and commitment to execute them, there is no plan and the plan will result in failure. So avoid telling people what the strategy is if there is no means to execute it.

Creating grandiose strategies that find their way into glossy brochures, new advertising campaigns, and rhetorical conference speeches — but never get implemented. (Fighting Corporate Hubris, BCG)

Inflating & Exaggerating

This decade, we have seen the rise and fall of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, wherein 2003, raised money from private market investors in excess of $700 million, with no real product, business model and a series of false claims about the company’s technology, it’s business operations, the product, and financial performance. Holmes told everyone, that Theranos had hold of an innovative product that could incite your complete entire health profile, with a single drop of blood, the technology nor the product didn’t exist. The people, the media all swooned over the Theranos founder, with pristine editorial coverage on renowned publications as Forbes and Fortune magazine, Holmes was promising. Even Joe Biden, now president of the United States, spoke during a visit to Theranos manufacturing in Newark, California in 2015. Biden toured the facility and took part in round table discussions on health care practices in preventive tech and innovation.

It all took a downturn in 2018, where the Securities and Exchange Commission today charged the Silicon Valley-based private company, its founder, and its president with raising money on the pretense of hyper-inflated value and a product that only did a little bit of what it was meant to do, the biggest mistake, was telling investors in presentations, product demonstrations and release PR new stories where media outlets, were reporting that the company has developed the product to pioneer the medical blood testing industry, the portable blood analyzer, supposedly was able to direct and conduct comprehensive blood tests from finger drops of blood. The pitch was that it can revolutionize the medical industry.

In truth, the product did analyze some and could only complete a small number of tests, however, the company conducted the vast majority of patient tests on modified and industry-standard commercial analyzers that were in fact, manufactured by other organizations and the claims of the product being what is, was misleading, dubious and false and investors went down a rabbit-hole, yet the medical community remained skeptical at large. If there are lessons to learn in product development, stay true to the discovery of the product, its experimentation, and its promise, and whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of being in denial of reality and where your product really is at.

If there is a lesson learnt in developing product and going out to market with it, don’t say you have something when you have nothing and if you want to keep your job, don’t promise things that just cant be done.

Don’t fall for when ‘Simon Says…’

When you fall into the pit of what someone else has said, in your organization, you’re going to get trapped in design hubris, usually, it’s the thinking that they know more than your customers, they are better than them and they are better than their employees, better than you and better than the past.

When founders say ‘Just get this feature out, we need this for sales’ it’s an interpretation in its own form, where the message is ‘We’re losing sales because we don’t have this feature and very often or not, it’s rare that a subset of new features are the reason that the organization is going down on revenue and they are not closing deals.

Another good one is ‘Our competitor has it, why don’t we have it too?’, ok so I have mixed feelings about this, often enough features that are scoped out by large big-business have large UX teams and most often, are rarely dysfunctional in feature discovery and they don’t skimp on user feedback and usability testing, but sometimes competitors make mistakes. So just because Simon said so, doesn’t mean you as a product owner, need to fulfill this, what you need to do is assess the feasibility and ask questions about why it’s needed, where is the data to back this.

Whilst cloning and copying the things others have done before you without being critical of the mistakes they discovered in the product journey, can lead to a pattern of future mistakes where you will be distracted from focusing on real-customer problems and just implementing the status quo.

Radical transparency is conducted in several ways, in the form of sharing the company information and from top to bottom, sharing everything. It’s a mix of honesty and openness, of telling employees good news and bad news and not trying to hide anything and it requires courage, good communication skills, and the willingness to embrace and engage in open dialogue. In its purest form, radical transparency has no secrets, but companies often yet find it challenging how much do we tell our people, what does the transparency lever or spectrum looks like, and radical transparency, in itself, is ‘radical’ so, a shakeup can often lead to efficiency in operations and the development of mutual trust and loyalty between the organization and its employees. How it’s done can be rapid and often painful for those that don’t want it, but when it’s done to a dysfunctional organization, it creates a culture where the engagement of healthy disagreement is accepted. Best known for his works, Ray Dalio explains implementations and thinking around Radical Transparency in his book Principles: Life and work, where he says

‘ I want independent thinkers who are going to disagree’

As a product owner, embark on your journey of product discovery and figuring out the pain points of your customers, applying radical transparency in your work and what customers say will lead you to practice being honest and drawing a clear line of addressing its problems.

In some organizations, it’s an uphill battle for you to decide, the willingness to have thoughtful disagreements may be something you want, whilst others will not have the courage to do and that’s ok, in time if nurtured, it might get there. If in your organization Radical transparency or transparency at all, it’s not receptive, don’t make the mistake I made with sticking to it, can I impact this change, in my team and with my stakeholders? Am I ready to do so? That decision will only be from you.

Key Takeaways I had the pleasure to ask Mirza Salman Hossain Beg, on Linkedin to share his insights on the topic of Product managers, the importance of customer interviews, and overcoming dysfunctional organizations.

“If you really want to build a great product and hopefully turn that into a great business, make sure to have your calendar blocked for customer interactions every other week, if not more. “ — Mirza Salman Hossain Beg

‘Dysfunctional organizations do exist and often, hubris is the fatal flaw for many executives and first-time founders, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard we know our customer line thrown at me, when there has been no qual or quant research, sometimes it’s an impeding blocker at legacy organizations, and may even cost you your job as a Product Owner or Product Manager. Can you share your advice on how PO/PMs can overcome this?

Mirza Salman Hossain Beg

‘That’s a very good reflection, Sarah Huang. I don’t think there is a silver bullet here to protect a functional product team from a dysfunctional legacy leadership and organization. I’ve seen many times, the good ones move out to find respite’

If I could share 3 things that can mitigate these challenges early on, they would be-

1.Radical transparency should be the core guiding principle for any customer-centric organization/team, if not all. This creates the right holding environment to be wrong (whether a leader or a junior team member) and without any unfortunate consequences

2. Establishing a cadence from day 0. This creates a more expressed accountability and establishes governance.

3. Finally, I think PMs should always uphold the single truth and fight for it. Having dumb decision-makers and poor leadership is part of navigating in careers, I guess. Having strategic allies to support a PM to upload her values can easily evade such unwanted interferences.

Thanks to VP, Head of Innovation at Telenor, Mirza Salman Hossain Beg, I was able to get his take on how to overcome the challenges in organizations where radical transparency is a miss.

Ultimately a company and its product team will thrive only if it offers differentiated products or services to customers and deliver them well, where fostering open communication and an inquisitive culture where asking questions is encouraged. To remain in check of consistently practicing empiricism, transparency, inspection, adaptation to deliver value.

Don’t be a magician, Stay true to the customers’ folks, and be transparent.

The cause of this demise is more than one factor and very evidently pioneering innovation wasn’t on the books, the 4th largest investment bank couldn’t stay ahead of its heels during the financial crisis, and unfolded an array of destructive patterns during proliferating performances, culture is a key area to look upon, “A company must become entirely free of denial” — Gary Hamel, speaks words of wisdom in his Quest to resilience and analyses why companies need to be rigorous in re-adapting to stay in shape. “The ability to create a plethora of new options, as compelling alternatives to dying strategies”, is my favorite statement, let’s take a step back and think upon this for a minute, compelling alternatives, if you’re thinking quick folds within mergers and acquisitions, it may lead to further misses rather than hits, as often it can be seen as institutional decay rather than the answer that’s going to give you the edge required to stay ahead, another popular choice amongst executives, is working on strategic partnerships, that can open doors to unchartered territories, resulting in serving its purpose on the ultimate land grab, the first market entry, blue ocean strategy, yada.. yada. but staying immortal, now that’s something that every startup aspiring to become.

The value of today’s very clear and identifiable business landscape is; consumer loyalty, low customer acquisition costs, lower operating expenses, preferential distribution channels, hiring the right talent even diversification in parent-to-company portfolio products, but is this enough?

Perhaps, perhaps not, I’m still searching for the answers however, success has never been so fragile year on year. I see shifts in consumer spending and taste abruptly change from day to the second, especially online and I wake up every morning reading through Tech crunch’s newsfeed and the epitome and rise of non-traditional competitors and the pitfalls, the sinkers within the economy and of startups freshly spun. It is our practices and the way we have learned to do things, that is changing and it is an innovation that may be the core answer to continuing business momentum, but not disorderly, cluttered, fragmented innovation, innovation practiced requires discipline, a regiment and a firm hand in execution and the question to ask are you willing to stretch far enough in re-inventing your core business before it’s too late?

Remember “that a company that fails to adjust to its changing environment soon loses its relevance, its customers, and its support from stakeholders”, so stop the denial, the arrogance be conscious of what’s changing and consider how will these changes affect your current success.

At the early stages of a start-up, the MVP stage (minimum viable product) you need to take risks, where every minute of your day counts and you are required to take a bare bone, shoe string approach to launching your first cut into the market. The keyword here is ‘first cut’ striving for perfection will amount to considerable delays and the risk that someone else might just go to market before you do is extremely high, on the other hand, the definition of perfection is having all the bells and whistles we need to operate for years to come, the question is do you need all these bells and whistles to operate presently?

The first phase of your business, should concentrate on building your product and launching it. Get it launched fast, is something I hear everyday. A co-worker once taught me a very valuable lesson, “Sarah, don’t put anything out in public — if you are not proud of your work” and I’d like to think that I follow this, but to be perfectly honest, as a co-founder passionate in design, development and functionality, I have to swallow my pride and concentrate on going to market. This level of concentration, focus, is what differentiates between start up entrepreneurs and c-level executives. However how much are you sacrificing? The cause of improper planning, unorganised structure and lack of strategy is the ‘downside’ and downsides lead to poor performance. If you’re expecting to launch a business without covering best practices, whether it’s inventory selections or website usability, you may need to rethink your decisions. In today’s day and age of digital and eCommerce tech, we can’t afford to go the ‘amazon way’, we cannot afford to take shortcuts and just launch without thinking of our longer term viability, our brand image, we’re surrounded by competitors and we need to remain competitive and competitiveness is not about price, however this is when you reflect at each fork in the road and ask yourself “Does my opportunity, outweigh my cost?”