Product management in startup

I always loved product management. Thinking about what others want is such a selfless feeling.

It is not a natural instinct for everyone. It is tough, human beings are designed to be egoistic. 

Product management is like a right drink, alcohol(Technical skills),water(Business acumen) and ice(User experience).Product management follows S Curve and includes product development(Microphone as inbound) and product marketing(Speaker as outbound).

 

Microphone activities include customer research/feedback, trend analysis, competitive analysis, and development.Speaker activities are feedback, distributing marketing messages, training sales people and engagement team, brand promotion strategies. 

Sitting in room and believing what customer wants didn’t work well for many companies. This might be the reason why startup became beast enough to swallow big corporate products.So now let us think about the small boat, does startup require product management team?Are the co-founders smart enough to figure out what product needs? The answer can be yes, if one of the co-founders is a product guy!That also means startup needs a product guy.

 

Product management should simmer the boundary with other disciples like sales, development and customer engagement.It needs complete involvement from the whole company so that right signals are passed to product team. 

What it takes to make a great product management in your startup?

Start from top: Everyone in the startup should believe that product management is very important.

Don’t forget gut feelings comes from gut neither brain nor heart. Even CEO has to listen to what product management team says!This also means all the decision makers should have “product guy” qualities defined below.

Audience Discovery: Sometimes startup lose focus because proper audience discovery is not done.

The product management should discover the audience and understand their needs in depth.Build persona and write down the what they want to do.You have to metamorphous to a “Black Swan” and it needs practice.

Don’t love your product: Product management team should not get obsessed. Don’t build a product you want.Build a product customer wants. This falls back into Audience discovery and understanding  their needs.

Process is a garbage collector: In product management focus and methodological approach is very important.But do you need elaborate process ?. The answer is no, use process as a garbage collector.Use it as a tool for focus. Whenever you feel some task takes away your focus add a process to do that.Also add process when you feel anybody should be able to do the task.

Put the team into focus: Product guy is the “NO” guy not the “YES”. When bunch of passionate people brain storm over new feature lot of opinions surfaces.Looking deep into facts and doing the right thing for the customer is “must” for product management.

Fear of failure: As a product manager fear of failure can prevent you from doing the right thing. ”Fixing Fast” is more important than doing it right first time.Build your team around this.

Core Fans: Identify the core fans of your product. Best way to identify your core fan is to look at the data you collected about usage.This is as important to remember that this group is the right audience you discovered. Core fans can really accelerate your brand value.They are the ambassadors and see value in your product. They will pay for your product. Core fans also knows how handicapped your product is.Listen to them.

Continuous feedback: The importance of feedback is spoken a lot about but how many companies does make it actionable. And sometimes startup over react to the feedback derailing the product.

The right balance is the most important job of product management.

Most of the above point is applicable for all companies.

So what you think is the right thing happening in your startup w.r.t product management?

 

Software development process in Startups

In software development we always start with “Hello World”. We never start with “ABC”. My little one was watching "fruit train" today and this made me think about it. Sometimes we jump into “Hello World” without learning ABC. A dev team for startup is different. How you build it defines most of the tech startups.  

When I thought about process of software development it got outlined as mixture of process and principles. Following is what I discovered.

Agile Process:

The mission statement of our dev team is “Quick with Quality”. We cannot choose one from either of them. This is also one of the reason “People matters” (See my earlier blog). Recruiting the right people will enable you achieve both.

Development process makes quality of deliverables from all the team members agonistic of quality of the people. Common mistakes are avoided by following process. I think if you have right team with business acumen, need for strict process reduce drastically. And building that team is what it takes.

Mostly testing is ignored in early stage start-ups which leads to demo syndrome* and poor quality. This also leads to team getting randomized with lot of bug fixes. Following will help to improve quality and efficiency:

Buddies in team:

1.       Testing each other’s code :Testing improves quality and product understanding.

2.       Avoid single point of failure: At least two developers knows the code and configurations. This will come handy for you in many ways in development and business practice.

Automate: Whenever you have time automate the testing as much as possible. Start by writing Build Verification Test (BVT) and move towards Unit Testing(UT). Start the practice before your code base becomes very large.

Sandbox environment: It is very important to build a sandbox testing environment. Everything works in developer’s box**.Virtual environments is means to reduce the cost.

Scrum: Daily standup meeting are very critical to keep the team focused and achieve the mile stones. As advocated by Scrum Gurus keep it brief and precise. Keep the sprints as short as possible. Maintain backlog of the all the requirements and feedbacks. 

Source control, reviews and testing should be mandated even for small teams.

Business validation process:

In startup the software development team should be integrated to product, customer engagement and sales team. Business development and software development can’t be separated. It is very important for leaders to define purpose and principles of the start-up and make sure that team knows about it. If developer is doing something other than core business, Stop!. It doesn't mean stop innovating, it means focus.

When you reduce the barrier between dev and other teams the inevitable side effect are following:

• Team getting randomized by others teams
• Lot of noise-business requirements from other team.

It is very critical for dev leader to make sure that it doesn't go to this extent.

When it comes to features to implement its a haywire. Pick your right battle at right time. Pick the "Right" features for the customer rather than allowing customer to pick the "Right" feature. This task is very difficult than most of us think, especially if your audience is diverse. The above doesn't mean you don't listen to customer. Following practice might help.

• Problem Validation: Does the problem exist for wide audience.
• Feedback Analysis: Filter the noise from customer feedback. And prioritize the feedback.
• Product Validation: Do you want to solve the problem now or guide customer towards some existing solution. It might include suggesting your competitor or other solution providers.This is tough for most of us.

In spite of the speed of development, uniformity among different components, intuitiveness of the eco- system, focus on the problem and value add should not be derailed.

Don’t develop features which you like. "Disconnect” yourself, listen to the market and solve the most important problem. After all you’re not going to use it, your customers are.

Continuous development process:

When you are travelling very fast small mistakes get amplified with time. Continues feedback and corrective actions doesn't have any substitute. Earlier you listen to feedback and fix it less catastrophic it will be.

Following helps in continues development and deployment:

Continues deployment: Integrate as often as possible in the sandbox environment. Let each developer take pride about not breaking the integration environment. There should be daily continuous deployments to sandbox.

Continuity plan: A startup needs business continuity plan. It can be simple but there should be a plan.

Enable the team: Once you have right team, enable the team. We don’t have robots to do software development yet. Come back to reality. Acknowledge that people make mistakes. They need higher purpose to work in startup. Allow them to make decisions, allow them to make mistakes, allow them to interact with business as required. Don't be overprotective about what you developed from scratch. The team should run without you …period.

Build Operable system: Build software which gives you continues feedback from system and business perspective. I have discussed this in detail earlier.

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* Demo syndrome : Your application never works when you go for demo with client or leaders..
** Dev box : Developers computer. 

 

 

Traits of Rock Star Software Engineer

Question: Who you want to hire for your team?

Answer: A Rock Star Software Engineer.

I am at a juncture where I started thinking about forming the “A team”. We all know the importance of “P”. Fortunately I have had the privilege to work with real “Rock Stars”. I pinned all the traits which is common to all those.

Tagline of great companies reflects what they stand for. Thought it will be a great Idea to map them to traits of a “Rock Star”.

I’m lovin’ it (McDonald's)

They love what they do. All good programmers are passionate artist. Artist’s gives utmost importance to the details, perfection and finishing touch. Takes pride in their code.

Look for good story tellers. When you read their code you feel like you are reading a story. Story will be very precise and concise. Good documentation, unit test and following fundamental principles of software engineering will be quiet natural for them.

Evaluation: Ask how you will mentor a new joinee into a good software engineer. Ask for importance of unit test, principles and a practical stories.

Just Do it (Nike)

For Agile working environment we need rock stars who can just do it. No non-sense. They will find ways to do it rather than ways of not doing it.

No reinventing the wheel. They will do it the smartest way. (Design pattern, framework, copy code)

Just do it also means they learn quickly and take tasks to the finish line.

Evaluation: Ask about application of patterns and reasons of selecting frameworks. Ask about an experience of doing something out of comfort zone.

Think Different (Apple)

They have business acumen. They are not code factory. They know what they do. They will have understanding of the bigger picture. They ask difficult questions and have to be themselves convinced before doing it. They think different and come up with simple and innovative solution.

Evaluation: Ask about projects end to end workflow and business value. Check if he is asking questions to clarify and does story telling. Give a problem which sounds complex and look for the approach.

Imagine it Done (Unisys)

Imagine it, consider it done. Great problem solving skills are essential. Approaching the problem in a disciplined manner is trait which make them different. No follow-up is required. They will make sure that the whole team is orchestrated and informed.

Evaluation: Look at the approach of problem solving. Ask about deployment and co-ordination with other teams.

Because You're Worth It (L'Oréal)

Confidence is the super trait they possess. They knows how much they are worth. You get what you have paid for. Money is not the only thing which attracts them they believe in something and they stand for it.

More number of developers are not equivalent to a Rock star. For that matter sometimes they are irreplaceable.

Evaluation: Is he begging Or He know what he wants. Confidence comes with knowledge and trust. Don’t confuse with great communication skills.

Betcha Can't Eat Just One (Lays)

They are curious people. They are aware of latest news in technology or internals of how things. They learned internals of operating system because they want to not because they have to. Data structures and algorithms will be in their blood (or will derive solutions from basic understanding towards existing principles).

When they don’t know they listen. They will not make others feel they know everything.

They will have projects which is not related to work. They always learn, imagine and innovate and do things differently. No complaints about absence of challenging work.

Evaluation: Ask problem solving question with application of data structures and algorithms. Observe if they listens, questions, and disagrees if required. Ask about contribution to open source or stretch projects or community contributions. (Gist?)

Connecting People (Nokia)

They are not ball of mud. They connect people. Rock stars believes that by mentoring and helping others you can add more brains and hands to yours.

They get things done. Again! They are not just code factory. They also helps software community in some way or other (Blogs, forums, open source).

But call them for a movie they might not come J

Evaluation: By now you know that.

Conclusion

You will get geeks, nerds.. but they are rare…The Rock stars!