I’m not a big fan of the word “product strategy”.
Especially if it means filling slides with hypothetical futures.

But not having one means shipping with no purpose.
Building a Frankenstein product.
Wasting precious resources.

Here are 4 steps any startups can follow to create a great product strategy:

1. Open the game
2. Be different
3. Start with tactics
4. Lean toward your vision

1. Open the game

Napoleon loved chess.
For him, no chess opening move was better than another.

He thought the best strategy was to play something.
Anything. And put the game in motion.

A great product strategy is the same.
Start by listening to customers and their problems.
Then build something they want. Anything.

Don’t overthink the competition.
When Stripe launched, Paypal was huge.
When Airbnb launched, hotels were huge.
It didn’t matter. They joined the game.

2. Be different

Next, make sense of what you built.
For that, map your product capabilities into 4 categories.

❌ Elimination: factors of the industry have long competed
⬇️ Reduction: factors to reduce below the industry standards
⬆️ Raise: factors to raise above all industry’s standards
⭐️ Creation: factors the industry never offered

This map is called the Blue Ocean matrix.
I will help you build something different.
And focus your resources on what you’re the best in the world at.

Apple used it too.
The first iPhone (2007) differentiated this way:

3. Start with tactics

Having great tactics is the best product strategy you can have.

Picture tactics as short paths.
They’re the individual steps you’re taking.

Strategy is where you’re going.
It’s the line you’ve drawn.
A great product strategy means taking the fastest line.

How you sequence your tactics matters too.
Airbnb wouldn’t be where it’s at if it had started with Airbnb experience, instead of bedrooms.

4. Lean toward your vision

There are hundreds of tactics possible.
Millions of sequences, or strategies.

So which one is best?
The ones that follow your vision.

Without a clear vision, you won’t know where to start.
Or where to go next.

Make sure your company has a clear vision.

Airbnb’s vision never changed.
Only their tactics did.

If you’re at an early stage, coming up with a great product strategy can be challenging.

I hope this method helps you. Take care 💜

Stellar Product Strategies for Early-stage Startups was originally published in Product Coalition on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Pre-revenue startups get distracted. Only 3 metrics matter at this stage.

Reaching Product Market Fit is like crossing a desert.
Very few will survive.
Mirages of PMF happen all the time.

It takes months, sometimes years, before charging your users.
You need to know if you’re heading in the right direction.
You need a compass.
An indicator that you’re heading in the right direction.

Enters the 3 essential product metrics.

If you have a digital product, and are pre-revenue then only 3 product metrics matter:

1. Active users
2. User Retention
3. Core feature engagement

1. Active users

If you only pick one metric, pick active users.
It gives you the number of unique users that get your product value.

Pick daily, weekly or monthly active users based on the ideal frequency of usage of your product.

Active users tell you if you’re building a sticky product.
It’s a great proxy to monetization.

It’s a metric that you can move after a day or a week.
It’s motivating.

Define as “active” the people the users that get the unique value out of your product.
Ex: for Airbnb it’s booking a night, not opening the app.

2. User Retention

Retention shows the percentage of users that comes back over time.

A retention curve that flattens is a sign that a consistent amount of people come back over time.

Retention is harder to move than the number of active users.
But when it improves then it’s a great indicator.

It means you’re part of your users’ lives.
There is a good chance that these users value your product.
And will consider paying for it.

3. Core feature engagement

If you’re a consumer product, then use the number of interactions on a key feature. Ex: number of snaps sent.

This is because engagement pulls everything else up.
If engagement skyrockets it’s very unlikely that your business isn’t going better.

This may sound simplistic, but it works.

These 3 product metrics are great KPIs to adopt before you charge.
If you ever feel lost in a desert, then pick one of them.
You can’t go wrong.

Hope this helps 💜

The Only 3 Metrics that Matter at Pre-Revenue Startups was originally published in PM101 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Everyone should take product decisions in a startup.

Not only product managers, or founders. Everyone.

Overcentralized decisions hurt.

For lots of pre-product market fit startups, it’s not clear who should take product decisions.

There is an easy answer to that.

By priority order it should be:
1. everyone
2. founders
3. specialist

1. Everyone

In theory, it’s everyone’s responsibility to make product decisions.

Onboard team members with empathy. Give them direct access to customers’ feedback. And train them to prioritize well.
Then everyone should be able to make great product decisions.

To be clear this includes engineers that should run customer support. Steve Jobs used to put a phone on Apple engineers' desks. Some calls would be re-rooted so them and they could hear feedback firsthand.

That’s the ideal approach but not the only one. Sometimes having a dedicated person makes more sense.

2. Founders

If you can’t promote the culture I mentioned in 1. then the best people to run your product are your founders.

In early stage, founders should make sure that the product matched their vision. They can’t afford to lose sight of customers’ feedback.

Exposing founders also helps to confront their vision with the real world. It’s a reality check. It’s also more capital efficient.

If having one or several of your founders isn’t an option, then go with a specialist.

Here is when this approach works well.

3. Specialist

You can centralize product decisions to a specialist. It can be with a product manager. Or by giving extra responsibilities to an engineer, designer, or anyone else.

This approach works for companies with an “execution play”. Companies with a very clear product strategy that just needs to be executed.

In my experience this works really well for copy-cat companies. In this situation you don’t need a vision-driven roadmap, more to replicate the business that exists.

This tends to work less with vision-driven companies that need to try a lot of things.

Lastly, there are situations where founders are too inexperienced to make product decisions. Calling this out and recruiting someone to handle this job is courageous. It’s often the best thing founders can do for their company.

I’ve seen that happening a few times, it works too.

There isn’t a single way to handle product decisions in early stage.
It depends on your culture, your founders, and the “play” you’re going after.

If you can go with option 1, do it.

In my experience companies with decentralized product decisions tend to execute faster. And make more informed decisions as they use more brains.

If you can’t go with 2. or 3.

The beginning of the year is a great moment to reflect on who should make product decisions in your startup.

If you’re pre product-market fit, I hope this framework helps.

Am I missing anything?
Let me know in the comments 🤗

Everyone should take product decisions in a startup was originally published in Agile Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Early stage startups, your product execution speed is everything.

But how can you go fast with so few resources?

One solution: being scrappy.

Product teams, you don’t have time to do all the things you should.
No time to run a great discovery, or to organize feedback.
No time to give design feedback or collect feedback post-launch.

In pre Product/Market Fit this is even worse.

Startups can solve that by switching their mindset.
From perfection to scrappy.

This shift is what happens to first-time sales.
As humans, we’re told not to waste things.
First-time sales stop that.
They reject that mindset of perfection.
And embrace a mindset of plenty.

If a deal is stalling, if it turns out an account is not a perfect fit, and so on, great, fine, they close it out. On to the next.
They’ll get them the next time around.

Product managers, you should also reject perfection.
Instead embrace scrappy.

Scrappy means you’re trying to achieve things with as little resources as possible. As fast as possible.

It means putting preconception of how to do things aside.
And instead seek for quick & elegant solutions to learn things fast.

Being scrappy doesn’t you half-ass things. Or being sloppy.
It means doing things really, but cropped down.

Here are good examples of being scrappy:

❌ Perfection: building a prototype in Figma
👍 Scrappy: draw prototype in a flipbook

❌ Perfection: set up a user enrichment tool
👍 Scrappy: go on Linkedin & copy information

❌ Perfection: Integrate Stripe
👍 Scrappy: Send an invoice

❌ Perfection: Build a roadmap
👍 Scrappy: List priorities in bullet points

Product teams, being scrappy is your cheat code.
It will help you save hours and progress through your topics at light speed.

Over time your execution will compound.
It gives you a competitive edge.

Hope this helps 💜

Once in a while, a company comes up with a fresh new design that rapidly spreads, like fire.

This happened with Linear which brings an Apple-like design to work software. Minimalistic and premium looking.

Once startups decided to follow this path. This design moved from being marginal to more mainstream.

Beyond pixels, these startups make a statement “We are spending more time and energy than anyone to sweat the details”.

They want to be Linear for their market. I call them the “Linears”.

This article is a tribute to this movement that I wanted to capture.

I hope you find inspiration in them.

The originals

First the originals.

Linear can’t claim the dark background pattern trend. But it came up with elements of design that are clearly identifiable. The 3 most noticeable ones are:

1. Product screenshot with grid animation (hero)
2. Feature screenshots with gradient background (body)
3. Features tiles (body)

1. Product screenshot with grid animation (hero)

2. Feature screenshots with gradient background (body)

3. Features tiles (body)

Without further wait, here are the Linears.

The Linears

Here are a couple of recent Linears.

• Scale.ai

• Railway

• Hyperping

• Design maestro

• Liam Is

• Parcel

• Fig

• Turbo

• Code crafters

• Reflect

• Relayed

I’m collecting the full list of Linears here.

Want to submit a website you can comment on this post 🤗

The Linears was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Traditional product management is useless at early stage.

It adds friction, decreases the delivery pace, and reduces impact.

But you can adjust that.

Product management in pre Product-Market Fit (PMF) is a very little understood concept.

Product managers, you are not to blame. You learned your job in post-PMF environments. Or reading books written by leaders that worked there.

Your job isn’t the same job as the one described in these books.

• In post-PMF: someone needs to be the voice of the customers otherwise it gets lost.
• In pre-PMF: someone needs to spend time collecting feedback.

Don’t follow product management books blindly. Actually don’t even waste time reading them. 99% are totally irrelevant to where you’re at.

Here are the DOs and DON’T of product management in pre-PMF that I learned them the hard way 🤬.

❌ DON’T

• Build a roadmap, especially beyond 3 months. Your product changes too fast.
• Write user stories, EPIC, or any kind of abstraction. They slow you down.
• Get lost in user research. Sometime you may just ship it, and you’ll learn faster.
• Try to influence people. If you have an opinion say it out loud and act on it.

✅ DO

• Talk to customers every day. Continuously share learnings with your team.
• Write problem statements. Prioritize them, not “roadmap items”.
• Get real. Prototype stuff in Figma, QA the product, etc. Do everything you can to increase the delivery.
• Collect feedback on your releases. Most things require an iteration.
• Empower people to make product decisions. Centralized decisions will slow you down.

Building an early-stage startup is one of the most exciting things that exists.

Hope this article helps you get more clarity on the actions to follow to reach PMF! 🎢

Product Management DOs and DON’Ts for Early Stage Startups was originally published in PM101 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Talking to customers is scary. Startups never do it enough. Lack of time, no clear processes, fear, and ego.

You can change that with automation.

Talking to customers makes us vulnerable. It’s the same reason why we delay going to the doctor.

It’s one of the hardest things to do for a startup.
And I’ve never met a startup that is talking too much to its users.

That’s understandable.

As humans, we fear negative feedback. Yet if we don’t talk to customers, our assumptions can never be wrong 😉

We have consensus bias. We think everyone thinks and acts as we do.
We have egos. We think we know what people want.
More often than not, we’re wrong and prioritize the wrong things.

You can fix that.

Don’t be wedded to your ideas and put feedback collection on auto-pilot.
This way you’ll have a constant stream of feedback. And won’t have any other choices than talking to your customers. Every day.

Here are 11 ways to talk to your customers and collect feedback on auto-pilot - every single day:

1. 📧 Automated feedback emails: after sign up, after 1 week, after a purchase
2. 📱 Shared Slack channel, or Whatsapp groups
3. 📞 Optional onboarding calls
4. 🐦 ReMessage & Comments on Twitter and Linkedin posts
5. 💬 In-app chat
6. 📬 Newsletters with a prompt or incentive to respond
7. 👨‍👨‍👧‍👧 Groups: Slack, Discord, Facebook
8. 🎓 Peer-to-peer review platform: G2, Capterra
9. ❓Automated surveys after 60 days
10. 👍 In-app feature feedback (vote 👍 / 👎 next to a feature)
11. 2️⃣ Automatic invites to a bi-weekly user testing session

⭐️ Bonus one
Share an unusual calendar booking link. This makes people smile and increases the amount of user calls being booked. Mine is my “first name dot chat”.

Talking to customers doesn’t have to be painful. Instead, you can automate it. Then reply to messages you receive, or show up. Of course, automation sure lowers the initial barrier and gets the conversations going, but driving the conversations is up to you.

The best part of setting feedback on auto-pilot is that this process compounds.

The more feedback you collect, the better your decisions.
The better your decisions, the better your product.
The better your product, the more users you get.
The more users, the more feedback 🤗

Over time capturing this feedback will become your competitive advantage.
Don’t miss this opportunity.

Do you know other easy and automated methods to collect feedback? Please let me know in the comments 🙌

11 ways to talk to your customer — every single day was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Asynchronous communication doesn’t make a company remote.

Trying to translate in-office culture into digital neither.

So what does?

Having a poor remote culture has disastrous effects.

Teams aren’t happy.

They aren’t productive, or even aligned on what needs to be built.

As human beings, we’re more complex than that.
We seek balance in the things we do.

Building a great remote organization is an art.

Here are 9 resources to improve your remote culture, today!

🎯 1. Know your goals: “7 habits of successful remote employees” (The Next Web — link)

Remote work brings freedom, but it can be easy for remote employees to get off track.

A goal-first approach to work is essential to keep everyone aligned and to start each day with purpose.

💬 2. Communicate asynchronously: “Everything We Know About Remote Work” (Buffer — link)

In remote, work doesn’t happen at the same time for everyone. Communicate asynchronously when possible.

Keep meetings on video calls too, but have the option to move to asynchronous when it feels best.

🔟 3. Adopt rules on team chat: “The 10 Slack Agreements” (Buffer — link)

Give all the context someone needs to reply to you later.

When in doubt, always post a message where everyone can read it.

Thread when you can.

🚷 4. Set I’m away status: “The Zapier’s guide to working remotely” — link

When you work remotely, you’re always invisible.

You need to go out of your way to let people know if you’re away from your computer. Use automatic status updates in your team chat tool.

💧 5. Set up a virtual water cooler: “What is a Virtual Water Cooler” (Mural — link)
We’re all human, online or not.

Create chat rooms where people can “hang out” virtually and interact throughout the day on any work or non-work issue.

🌮 6. Meet in-person: “Remote” (Basecamp — link)

It is important for the team to meet up in person occasionally, say, 2x a year.

It creates an opportunity for people to be get reacquainted with one another as individuals.

💜 7- Stay connected on a personal level: “5 tips for ramping up on remote work in a hurry” (Atlassian — link)

Working remotely can feel lonely.

Using video calls for impromptu discussions whenever possible goes a long way.

🧘 8. Show empathy: “4 Reasons Your Remote Team Needs Extra Empathy At Work” (Trello — link)

Resources on this list focus more on the practical aspects of remote work.

Prioritize caring and empathy while your teams are far-flung.

👶 9. Deal with kids: “A Remote Work Guide, For Parents” (Trello — link)

Remote work isn’t only for those with no other responsibilities in life.

Set ground rules for how other people in the house can get in touch with you during the day.

To see what works for you, you’ll have to test some of these ideas.
So go on, and try things out.

Share this post to help other startups test more ideas 🙏

Happy experimenting!

9 resources to build a great remote organization was originally published in Agile Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Early-stage Product Managers, you’ve been lied to.

You were told to do a bit of everything. But doing the splits hurts your company. You can regain focus with the Product Management Yin and Yang. If you’re a product manager (PM) you’re maybe juggling with 10 things. Trying to push that boulder up that hill.

This may sound like the right thing to do. After all, you’re at the crossroads of several disciplines. And this is what was described in the job description.

This is wrong.

Not only are you wasting your energy, but also hurting your company. There are some tasks you need to be great at. And some tasks you shouldn’t do. And you can’t achieve that if you’re going broad and shallow.

Great PMs figured this one out. They do less, and better. When you see them they’re calm and in control. They’re performing extraordinarily well.

You know what being focused means. Your role is to make other people in the team focus to execute. But it’s always the baker’s children who have no bread. Here is how you can find focus with the PM Yin and Yang.

1. First, figure out if you’re at product-market fit (PMF)

You’re at PMF if customers are banging at your door. If your customers pull your product so hard that you can’t catch up with demand.

2. Second, pick between Discovery and Delivery

If you’re pre-PMF focus on the Delivery. This is the Yin ⬛️

If you’re post-PMF focus on the Discovery. This is the Yang ⬜️

👶 Pre-PMF

At the Pre-PMF stage, you have no time for abstraction. Shipping fast is a proxy for your success. The more you roll the dice the more chances to succeed. You need to focus on the solution space.

Great tasks: collect feedback, write problem statements, prototype stuff, QA, “just-in-time” thinking.

👩 Post-PMF

At the Post-PMF stage, the biggest risk is losing sight of your customers. The second biggest risk is misalignment between teams, and with your company vision. To solve that you need to focus on the problem space.

Great tasks: support research, translate strategy, write vision statements, roadmaps, and user stories.

It’s About Balance and Focus

The Yin and Yang are not all black or white. On both sides, there is a bit of each other. This means you can focus on Delivery but do a little bit of Discovery at some point — or the other way around. What matters most is where you put your focus, and be intentional about it.

If you’re a product manager at an early-stage startup, then this is your chance to increase your focus and make an impact.

If you want to try, and want to keep yourself accountable, then comment below “🔍 Discovery” or “📦 Delivery”.

I’ll message you in 6 weeks to check if you stick to your commitment.

My focus? 📦 Delivery! Happy shipping!

Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.

The Product Management Yin and Yang was originally published in Product Coalition on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Chaque homme a sa passion qui le mord au fond du cœur, comme chaque fruit son ver.” - Alexandre Dumas

C’est l’histoire d’un enfant qui se découvre une passion et décide de renouer avec 20 ans plus tard.

6 ans, découverte de la Game Boy. Chaque année ma marraine m’offre un jeu vidéo car « ça rend intelligent ». Elle est la seule personne à penser ça.

Puis l’ordinateur débarque dans les foyers. Gaming (Age of Empire) et Peer-to-Peer (Kazaa). Les ordinateurs lag. Pour faire fonctionner un ordinateur il faut comprendre comment il marche. Comme beaucoup, je découvre les mots RAM et CPU.

Puis vient l’âge des études. Prise de cours et rendu de mémoire. L’ordinateur, outil de travail cette fois-ci.

• Collège: « T’es bon en math, fais un bac S»
• Lycée: « Tu ne sais pas quoi faire fais de l’éco»
• Fac: « Fais de la finance, c’est bien payé.»

Résultat j’ai 23 ans je bosse comme trader chez BNP Paribas à Hong-Kong. J’ai 8 écrans remplis de chiffres qui me font tourner la tête. Je ne me sens pas à ma place.

Je rentre en France faire une “parisienne”. Ça rassure mes parents. L’école de commerce, je n’y apprends rien. Mais ça a le mérite d’ouvrir les perspectives. Je découvre la tech. Je bosse sur un site de musique avec un ami Yannis.

Il me présente son collectif de freelancers, “Mangrove”. Un des membres me parle du product management. Un taff de généraliste dans une start up ça existe ?!

Je lis « Intercom on Product management » un livre qui banalise ce métier. Puis débute chez number26 (futur N26) comme stagiaire product manager.

J’ai 25 ans, je suis stagiaire. Mon salaire est divisé par 4 par rapport à mon dernier boulot en finance. Peu importe. Je sais que je veux monter une boîte plus tard et que le produit sera une compétence clé que j’apporterai.

6 ans plus tard, je bosse chez Intercom à Dublin. J’y rencontre Ferruccio. 2 fois par semaine on se lève à 6h du mat et on hack ensemble au Starbucks en bas du bureau.

Ça fait 6 ans que je bosse en produit et j’ai un problème récurrent: analyser la donnée. Aucun outil n’y fait. Je quitte mon taff pour monter June.so. La boucle est bouclée. Intercom m’a donnée envie de faire du produit. C’est la bas également que j’y ai fait mon dernier boulot en produit.

Mon histoire est une parmi tant d’autres mais elle m’a appris certaines choses.

Être dans l’action l’emporte. Je savais que je voulais monter une boîte. Je n’avais aucune idée que ce serait pour régler un problème que j’aurais découvert au cours de mon expérience produit.

Le monde change, les passions moins. Dire qu’on aime les ordi il y a 20 ans ça fait geek. Dire qu’on est développeur en 2022 c’est normal. Une passion finit souvent par vous rattraper. Piocher dans une passion de votre enfance peut s’avérer une bonne idée.

Chaque étape compte. J’ai conscience d’avoir eu beaucoup de chances. Merci à mes parents, ma marraine, merci la finance, merci l’école de commerce, merci Yannis, merci Mangrove, merci N26 et Intercom.

Que 2023 vous permettent de réaliser vos rêves,
Bonne année ! 🏝