Understanding Product: Resources for Startups

The following resources were created by Taylor Wescoatt, one of Seedcamp’s Experts-in-Residence. Follow Taylor on Twitter @twescoatt.

In my role as an Expert-in-Residence for Seedcamp, one of the main objectives of my job is to advise our companies on ‘Product’ thinking. It’s core to achieving Product-Market-Fit, and as with all our programmes at Seedcamp, we try to demystify the many art forms it takes to build great companies. In 20 years of ‘doing product’, I’ve been lucky enough to learn from some great folks and see the industry develop tremendously. Hopefully, some of these articles can be useful to your current or next venture.

Resources

• What do Product people Actually Do?  At the core – here’s what they should be giving you
• Got Product? Is your startup thinking about the key issues? Here are 4 ways to make sure you’re thinking about Product right.
• Product Challenges for Startups After about 100 interviews, I share some common issues that I hear from startups. Are you facing these?
• The Vision Roadmap V2 To help you translate your overall Vision into a staged set of steps that is more actionable for your team.
• The Customer Journey  There’s nothing more important in Product to understanding your Customer’s Journey really well.
• Assumptions Mapping Are you working on the right stuff in the right order?
• Validate or Die Inexpensive ways to get the feedback you really need on you ideas and products.
• Dual Track Agile The Validation Backlog is the missing link between the ‘MVP’ idea and making a product customers love.
• All Hail the Customer Council!  The latest craze in User Research
• Great resources to read about Product

Podcasts

• Interview with Paul at Notion Capital (May 2017)
• Intro with Carlos
• The Vision Roadmap
• The Behavioural Roadmap