This article was written by Taylor Wescoatt, one of Seedcamp’s Experts-in-Residence. Follow Taylor on Twitter @twescoatt.
I was asked by Product Tank to talk about the main product challenges I see in startups. Fortunately, a few months working with Seedcamp cohorts showed me that similar questions were being asked by many of them. Founders won’t be hiring professional product people until the 10th or 15th hire, but they can benefit tremendously from ‘Product Thinking’ from day one, and this is the basis of my onboarding talks.
Here are the main early stage struggles I find startups encounter in the product domain;
Let’s walk through these individually, and while I won’t use this post to explain my suggested solutions, I will reference some other articles that go deeper on the topics.
(1) Getting the Vision into the Team
Daniel’s startup was doing really well. He and his CTO co-founder had been working side-by-side for over a year, in constant communication, and totally aligned. New funding allowed him to bring on three more developers and leads for marketing, ops, and product. He was crazy busy. But a month in, things felt a little off, and decisions weren’t being made like he wanted them to. He’d outlined the long-term vision, but the team was struggling to understand where to focus in the near term.
Founders need to see their growing team making decisions roughly in accordance with their vision, but time and hectic schedules tend to lead to fractured understandings of what the company’s mission is about. A “Mission Statement” is great, or some kind of manifesto maybe, but sometimes knowing where you want to end up doesn’t tell you what to do TODAY. For this, I recommend the Vision Roadmap. Your ultimate end-state vision is something you will build to over time
(2) Identifying “Real Pain” and “Real Value”
One great idea is the core of a startup. “Wouldn’t it be great if you could order a taxi from your phone?” The idea gets people excited, investors, partners, employees, even early adopter users. But how do you really bring that to life in your product?
Any new business must CHANGE BEHAVIOUR of its customers, and for them typically it’s both hard risk. So it must be WORTH IT. How unhappy are they with how they do it now? This is Real Pain. How much better off will they be once they do? This is Real Value.
I believe deeply in using the Customer Journey to clarify and deliver against these goals. It forces you to see things from your customer’s point of view.
(3) What Questions should I address first?
Startups are all bets. We take a punt, make a guess, develop a hypothesis that something can be better, and users will like it. As we build our business, we are making a lot of these assumptions, and we will find out many of them are not quite true, sometimes leading to a business ‘pivot’. The sooner we find out, the better. How do we do this?
The Assumptions Matrix lets you graph your assumptions based on x) how fundamental they are to your business, and y) how unknown they are. Naturally, you want to focus FIRST on the ones in the upper-right – The Pivot Zone – by either learning more about the assumption (less unknown), or developing alternative approaches (less fundamental). Some things, often the most important, however, will just need to get built so you can see “if the dogs eat the dog food”.
(4) How should I engage with Customers?
Anyone who has read the required “Lean Startup” book knows in their heart they are supposed to be engaging with customers. This is challenging on a personal level, it requires us to systematically challenge our own beliefs, knowing we will often find we are wrong. Embrace it!
Good, now that you’ve embraced it, how do you do customer research without breaking the bank? Above all, decide in advance what you want to learn for every validation exercise. Then, whether you’re doing needs analysis or product analysis, the following techniques can be done by anyone:
BEFORE you go do any of these be very clear exactly what you want to learn, and dispense with any extraneous questions. In almost all cases, they will give you great insights, and if they don’t, at least you’ll learn a bit more about how to ask the right questions – where are you on each of these for your startup? Here’s a little more detail on how/when to use them.
Hopefully, some of these four challenges sound familiar to you as an entrepreneur or advisor to startups. They are plenty common, but fortunately there are structures and processes to resolve them. I’d love to hear from you (@twescoatt) if you’ve found similar or different issues!
For a list of all my articles: https://seedcamp.com/eir-product-articles/
This article was written by Taylor Wescoatt, one of Seedcamp’s Experts-in-Residence. Follow Taylor on Twitter @twescoatt.
When I became an Expert-in-Residence at Seedcamp, I was asked to drive product thinking deeper into the portfolio. Makes sense, supporting your investments in the Product Market Fit challenge, but product can sometimes be a slippery concept to grasp. “You know it when you see it” or “20 per cent month-on-month growth” are a few ways to tell when you’re “there” with your product, but how do you know if you’re on the right track?
Let’s start with what product means. In all cases, the product is connecting the user to the business. In early-stage companies especially, product “is” the business, since the user’s response is all that really matters in growing your business. Until you’ve got users happy, and doing what you want them to, you may have a product, but you don’t have a business.
Here are a few questions I have learned to ask, or better put, ask that founders ask themselves, to check if they’ve “got” product;
Easy to toss out general questions like this, I know, but what if I flesh them out a little bit in order to make them actionable.
If you are doing these four things, I would say your product thinking is in place. In any given situation, I too would rather be lucky than good, but over the long run, the startups I have seen win it, have won with the latter. Being customer centric will deliver you a massive competitive advantage, and is fundamental to your success.
For a list of all my articles: https://seedcamp.com/eir-product-articles/
This article is written by Taylor Wescoatt, Expert in Residence at Seedcamp. Taylor’s background spans 20 years of Product and UX having held key positions at successful startups like Seatwave and CitySearch, and larger brands like eBay and Time Out. This is the accompanying summary of two articles on Roadmaps for Startups; The Vision Roadmap for Startups, and The Behavioural Roadmap for Startups.
Congratulations! You’re starting a business, you’ve got a great vision, and a bit of traction. You’re growing, there are a million things to do. How do you decide what to focus on first? Everyone’s asking for different things. You need a Roadmap.
Typically Roadmaps are typically gantt-chart style diagrams of ‘what we’re going to build’. I’ve put together a lot of these “Feature-led Roadmaps”, and while the final product of long labour is usually appreciated, its pretty much out of date the moment it’s printed. This is confusing for everyone. Features are simply an abstraction between the Business and the needs of your User.
A simple diagram to visualise the steps from your vision to creating your MVP (click to enlarge)
In this series I share a model of roadmapping for Startups specifically. The goal is to get everyone aligned on what is being built and why.
We begin with translating your Vision into a Vision Roadmap full of staged Propositions, or ‘how a segment sees your brand at a given time’.
Each Proposition can then be translated into a full User Journey of Behaviours necessary to achieve that Proposition. Focusing on key Behaviours and only then starting to brainstorm features leads to a far more aligned, well thought through, and persistent plan that a startup can go build Minimum Viable Product tests against in order to validate your thinking and drive your business forward.
If you use these techniques, you’ll find as most startups do that you’ve got a renewed, refined, more accessible plan for delivering your vision.
Good luck!
This article is written by Taylor Wescoatt, Expert in Residence at Seedcamp. Taylor’s background spans 20 years of Product and UX having held key positions at successful startups like Seatwave and CitySearch, and larger brands like eBay and Time Out. This is the second of two articles on Roadmaps for Startups – the first of which can be read here.
Now that you’re clear on your Vision Roadmap, the next step is to figure out what to actually build. A roadmap’s job is to tell you where you’re going, and how to get there. With the Vision Roadmap we have a clearer idea of where we’re going, but that’s too high-level to let us know what to work on tomorrow.
Normally roadmaps look something like the below, that is, a bunch of features listed down the left, with delivery timelines Gantt-charted out.
These types of Roadmaps say what a company is doing, and what a user is getting, but thats where the problems begin;
I believe a roadmap can be built around what the Customer wants and needs. Lets go back to our example of Hogwash which started in the Vision Roadmap piece. One of the initial Propositions we planned to achieve was as follows;
“Hogwash is a convenient way to get the occasional last-minute sparkle on my car” Launch Proposition for the Busy Professional
Now our Product Funnel for a typical ecommerce solution (like Hogwash) might look something like this. These are all key steps we observer on-site, can measure, and reflect our KPIs directly.
Unfortunately this misses out on a lot of things that the Customer is going through, many of which you can use.
Here’s an example of a full Customer Journey for the same situation. Each step is a “Behaviour” that the customer undertakes in their journey. It starts well before they come to the site, and it ends only after they have demonstrated the behaviour that fulfills the company’s goals. In this case, repeat-purchase.
You’ll see that all the key Funnel steps are in there, but there are also steps in there before, after, and between them. The better insight you have into your customer journey, the quicker you can make key decisions like product changes or pivots, and the more advantage you have over your competitors.
Have a look at the step between ‘schedule appointment’ and ‘pay’, a place where there’s a particularly steep funnel drop. The step ‘talk to partner’ is just as important, if not moreso, to the Customer, and introduces an additional persona into the equation. Understanding this creates new opportunities in Product. You might address it directly, “Enter your partner’s email here and we’ll send them a summary”, to which you could solicit the partner’s feedback (eg scale of 1-10). Great new data and insight opportunity from simply recognising that this step exists! (Hogwash isn’t real, of course, but the example is real, from another startup)
Behaviours are “Actions” performed for “Reasons” with expected “Rewards”. I won’t go deeper on these in this post, but the more clearly you identify and validate these with your customers, the greater opportunity you have to compare, influence, and supplant them with the behaviours you want. The work of Nir Eyal, Nathalie Nahai, and Dan Ariely might be really helpful to look at.
Now that you’ve got your Customer Behaviours understood, pick the two you want to focus on for the next 90 days. This is your Behavioural Roadmap. Short, sweet, and customer-focused. All those other ideas can be saved for posterity in The Opportunity Cloud, you may get around to them later. Simple, right? I know its not pretty like the ones at the top, but hopefully you’ll find its a lot more relevant. Features don’t drive KPIs, Behaviours do.
Now comes the hardest part… coming up with great ideas! There’s no science to creating delight, but make sure you have your best people in the room. By focusing on Behaviours (action + motivation + reward), you have a better chance of coming up with a great idea than if you’re just focusing on features. IDEO’s work in the “How might we…” practice is worth looking at. The following three-step process (great article about Pandora here) takes you from which Behaviour you want to what Minimum Viable Product tests you want to undertake.
By focusing in on the entire Customer Journey, and understanding the underlying motivations and rewards for the user, you’ve now developed some serious competitive advantage. Your team is far more empowered to develop great ideas with you, and there is a much stronger sense of purpose and direction to all those late nights you’ll be spending delivering your world-changing idea.
Want to hear about it in Taylor’s own words? Listen to the accompanying podcast!
This guest post is written by Hemal Kuntawala from M&S Venture Labs. The Venture Lab uses lean startup techniques to experiment with new business models that evolve retail and ecommerce at M&S.
I recently spent time with some technical and non-technical founders, and nearly all of them commented on how they found it difficult juggling the different disciplines involved in building a product. They’re right, there is a lot to juggle, and the context switching can cause some serious whiplash and brain-drain.
Each phase of product development requires a different perspective, almost a different mindset. At one end of the scale you have a big-picture view of the world, like looking at the market you’re in and hypothesising new value propositions. At the other end you have nitty-gritty details like the pixels and font-sizes of your UI.
I wanted to try and document these differing perspectives and provide some advice on how to manage the constant switching. Here’s a diagram to illustrate this spectrum and how the different activities of product development fall into them. (I should mention that this isn’t a comprehensive description of how to build stuff).
At the top end you’ll find yourself with a big-picture view of the world, and at the bottom you’ll be sweating the small nitty-gritty details. I’ll quickly rattle through what each of these entail, with some context from my team (at M&S Venture Labs):
Big-picture: Value proposition Starting with a broad view of the world, here you’ll be thinking about the market you’re in, your business model and your value proposition – what it is you’re going to offer your customers.
Nitty-gritty: Customer development From there, customer development will take you into research mode to unearth insights on customer drivers, behaviours, and pain points. We’ll conduct guerrilla research in the street, as well as in our stores, to learn as much as we can about our customers.
Big-picture: Product principles Having gathered some insight it’s back to the big picture. Time to think about how a solution to the problem you’re going after might look. Broad principles that span most products will be UX things like effortlessness. In our team we also borrow from the marketing and branding worlds, thinking about things like the tone of communication we’d like to use.
Our designer Pete ponders his product principle post-it.
Nitty-gritty: User flows We go back to the nitty-gritty with user flows, defining the journey we want our customers to take. In our team this artefact is simply boxes and arrows on scrap paper. We’ll refine the flow as we identify points of friction. We’ll also map where data goes in and out, and think about any other moving parts involved in the experience.
Big-picture: Wireframes Happy with our user flow, we head back to a high-level point of view to think about the user interface and interactions. With more boxes on scrap paper, we try to keep things light-weight in favour of iterating in the browser as we bring it to life.
George struggles to decipher Neil’s wireframe, which he’s clearly quite proud of. Nitty-gritty: Code + pixels
Perspective changes again as we start to write code, with the team cracking on with the backend. For the front-end we stick to our mantra of “do it in the browser”. Here we’ll sweat the smaller details of visual design, nudging margins and font-sizes as we go. We’ll continue building and shipping (our current record for deploys to production in a day is currently 31) until we’re ready to traffic and measure.
Big-picture: Core metrics Back up to a high-level view to think about your metrics. With customers using the product you can take a couple of steps back and look at what they’re up to. If you’re not sure what you should be measuring, take a look at Dave Mcclure’s Metrics for Pirates (AARRR!)
Nitty-gritty: Data Back to the nitty-gritty detail of gathering data. Here we’ll be knee-deep in analytics, spreadsheets, and pivot-tables. In our team we’ll make life slightly easier for ourselves with hand-rolled dashboards for key metrics.
Hopefully this whirl-wind flow (with its generalisations) illustrates my point about the constant shifts in perspective. Be warned, these can cause dizziness, brain-melt, and/or whiplash. I’ve found having an appreciation of these shifts in focus can help anticipate them, which in turn helps to reduce the pain when jumping around.
If you’re new, having the discipline not to jump around too much in the first place is really important. It’s hard to avoid when you’re in fire-fight mode, but it’s important to only do one thing at a time, and to flow amongst the big-picture and the nitty-gritty detail as you move along. This illustration can also prove as a good sanity check. Every few days take a step back and assess where you are. Ask yourself if you’re working on the right thing, and if your level of focus is right. Is it too much or not enough?
This article is written by Taylor Wescoatt, Expert in Residence at Seedcamp. Taylor’s background spans 20 years of Product and UX having held key positions at successful startups like Seatwave and CitySearch, and larger brands like eBay and Time Out.
I started my Product career as a UX designer from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. We had some great teachers, including Lynda Weinman and a number from the MIT Media Lab building our Interface Design program. Graphic Design, Psychology, Technology.
I continue to believe strongly that at its core, Product is about managing the end-to-end experience of your user. Leaving aside the significant functional responsibilities of Product Management, which tend to arise in large organisations, I’ll suggest a few things that inspire me at the ‘art’ level of creating great products;
1. Hooked, by Nir Eyal beautifully explores the alluring goal of forming a “habit” with your product, the holy grail of consumer facing businesses.
2. Marty Cagan addresses with gravitas the myriad of challenges you’re likely to encounter in your Product role.
3. Lean UX, by Jeff Gothelf is a to-the-point toolset for looking at the the strong overlap between UX and Product. The Assumptions graphing alone is fantastic.
4. Nathalie Nahai gives some super entertaining presentations and deep and inspiring exploration of decision-making, always backed up with compelling and concrete applications.
5. When it comes to figuring out WHAT to be doing, The Google Design Sprint is a helpful resource to look at. There’s no formula for creating delight, but doing everything you can to foster creativity from your best people is really important.
6. UXPin (useful app) also provides a bunch of great short resources, like Lean B2B, on their knowledge page.
7. User Research is of course critical, and I’ve enjoyed what I have seen of Tomer Sharon and Laura Klein.
8. The Mom Test, by Rob Fitzpatrick is also a helpful way to make sure every conversation you have drives learning.
9. As an always updated resource to keep visiting, I’m a big fan of what Martin, Simon, and Janna have built with MindTheProduct
Recognising the early-stage reality that your Product is your Business, these books are must-reads for any Product person that wants to be credible;
10. Startup Owner’s Manual (the follow up to Four Steps to The Epiphany)
11. The Lean Startup, without which no reference list is complete
This guest post is written by Nikolaus Sühr (CEO & Founder) and Matthew Wardle (CTO & Co-founder) of Kasko, a digital insurance service provider bringing Insurance as a Service to the market.
You’ll often hear about how brilliant Seedcamp Week is, and we can attest to that – it’s been a really helpful experience for Kasko and we’re in a much stronger position as a company because of it.
One of the reasons the week is such a great experience is down to the incredible mentors and investors you get to speak to. Each one of them has a wealth of experience either leading or guiding startups to success, and they’re all super keen to help provide feedback on your startup.
A mentoring session underway at Seedcamp Week Berlin
But this is where it gets tricky… with so much feedback from so many individuals based on their own varying experiences, you can receive a wide range of answers to the same question.
Here’s some of the feedback we received during Seedcamp Week:
Like reading the news, to form a full picture you sometimes have to listen to several points of view and read between the lines. So here are a few tips on how to filter that information for your startup…
1. Sleep on it. The energy and excitement these visionary, successful people can generate in you is fantastic, but it pays to sleep on it so the next day you can process what was said based on the facts rather than the energy.
2. Discuss it with people you respect. For every major decision we’ve made we’ve probably discussed it with ten people we consider very smart. This is why your board of advisors is key.
3. Discuss with your business partner. If you’re anything like us – where you work, eat, and live together – this is given. But if it’s not, then you should make sure you discuss with them; you decided to work with this person for a reason.
4. Make up your own mind. Listening to advice is important, but remember that most likely you understand more about the intricacies of your own industry/business than them.
5. If you still can’t make a choice, just pick one. The chances are that both opinions are valid. Ultimately a good decision is one you feel comfortable with when you’re making it.
6. Drink a beer. It’s always part of our process!
For us, the feedback we received at Seedcamp Week was the best and most difficult to digest advice we ever received. Thanks to everyone. We might not have liked it at the time, but we certainly needed to hear it!
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