Product Leadership in A WTF World!
By: Dan Khan
Tags: Product Leadership, Covid-19, Product Management, Startup, Product Strategy

Product Leadership in A WTF World!

Whilst there’s lots of advice floating around the startup world at the moment about how to deal with this crisis as a CEO, there’s scant little focussed on what it means to product leaders as we figure out how to adapt our products in a changing world.

These notes are a recap of an online session I co-hosted on 22nd April 2020 with Tokes, sharing some of the messages, strategy, and applied learning from startups to product leaders, and to give the product community an opportunity to share how they’re responding.

Note: a video recording of the session, slides, and discussion transcript can be found at the bottom of this article.

Brief Introduction

For those who don’t know me or my product background, I’m an experienced Chief Technology- and Product- Officer with a background in growing high-growth, product-led startups from idea to millions of users in short periods of time.

I’ve also built a good chunk of the startup community in New Zealand, having co-launched Startup Weekend across the country, and having built the local startup acceleration landscape too — I’m no stranger to product-led startups!

I now use all of this experience to coach product teams and leaders to use the high-growth strategy, tools, and methods of startups to help them build sticky products that their customers love.

As personal context for this subject, after just raising VC for the last startup I launched, a high-fashion online jeweller, and being head down on product for 6 months, our eventual launch unfortunately coincided with the global financial crisis of 2008 throwing our business model and potential customers out of the window as people no longer wanted to buy $20K products online…

Let’s jump in!

We’re going to consider five key topics which as product leaders, we should be thinking about in responding to the current crisis:

Looking outward and planning for change Supporting our teams through uncertainty How does the current crisis change product discovery? How are we adapting our approaches to product delivery? How do we need to modify our lens of product success?

Startups & Uncertainty

I believe that in a world with so much uncertainty and opportunity, traditional product teams need to behave like startup teams to understand and navigate an uncertain future.

The global Covid-19 pandemic has reset our understanding of what the world going forward looks like, certainly in the short term, likely in the medium term, and who knows in the long term.

Quarterly product plans we might have developed 90 days ago probably look significantly different as we look into the next 90 days.

ANZ Merchant Card Transaction Data April 1–6, 2020

Whilst some of us who are in industries where nothing has changed (or conversely have seen increased demand) are lucky; for the majority, we need to rethink what happens when the businesses we were selling to no longer have any revenue or loyal customers we once had may well lose their jobs in the near future.

Startups give us an interesting lens to look at products in a new light during such times of crisis. They are masters at operating in conditions of extreme uncertainty, having optimised their processes to find and discover market-fit whilst the world changes around them.

I believe, therefore, that in a world with so much uncertainty and opportunity, traditional product teams need to behave like startup teams to understand and navigate an uncertain future.

Where you once may have had market-fit, you may well be coming into a new world where you need to revalidate assumptions that no longer hold true;

Strategies based on sound decisions and understanding of what your market looked like 90 days ago may be invalidated;

Product features and customer buying/usage behaviour may not exist any more.

So, we as product leaders, we need to fallback to thinking like a startup again, by predicting what our new future looks and going hard on re-discovery and re-validation of core assumptions to understand how our products need to change.

This means all the things that startups usually think about should be back on the table.

Whilst this #StartupWay might be the norm in more enlightened product teams, this way of operating isn’t always the case inside larger product teams or those who haven’t grown up this way.

And that’s fine — whilst a startup with a few users can easily experiment over its entire product, experimentation with a product servicing a million customers looks entirely different.

My key takeaway here is that for larger products, as our markets and customer behaviours change around us, we can’t afford to just focus on core product stability and protecting what worked in the past.

1. Planning For Change

Looking Up And Out

Whilst I’m no expert in economics, I think anyone looking back over the last 50 years of large recessions, can tell us there’s no quick recovery coming.

As spending declines, people naturally start focussing on maximising profit over growth, so the reality we all face is that it might be increasingly hard to sell our products in future.

As the world changes around us and markets and customers dry up, how do we adopt that same sense of urgency that startups use to figure out how to adapt?

As a startup, most team members are intimately involved in the planning process. But product teams in bigger companies don’t always have visibility over how the business is changing or how executive-level decision making affects their products.

But there are still decisions inside your team that you do have agency over so you don’t have to be completely disconnected from what’s going on in the market.

The biggest takeaway from what we’re seeing in startup advice here is that speed of decision making in product teams should get faster. The excellent FirstRound founder’s guide to navigating this crisis which inspired this talk, reminds us that we shouldn’t be operating at the same tempo as we were 90 days ago.

But it can be tough to go from planning quarterly to planning weekly like startups do. Most product people are focussed on the micro lens of their product and customers, and often find it hard to look outward to the market and see the bigger picture; but in times of uncertainty it’s essential.

This is the opportunity to reimagine how your market and product needs to be different. Your markets, and customer behaviours are going to change, and your product may have to work in new ways.

The key priority for product leaders now, is to have a clear hypothesis of the future of your market to inform your new product strategy

We’re lucky in New Zealand to have a good understanding of what the future scenarios for the country look like. But it’s harder to tell what the impact is going to be on our economy. How does that look on your company and the product you are building?

Detailing Your Approach and Scenario Planning

The best approach is to start with understanding the key uncertainties you now face. Come up with your best, worse case, mid case scenarios, and have some well-crafted responses ready to go. These responses should detail your new game plan, product direction and success targets.

You should also be clear what your trigger points are to activate those scenarios and when they might come into force — that could be an external trigger like entering level 2 lockdown (e.g. in New Zealand) or could be when airports reopen for example, or it could be a more correlated internal trigger such as customer churn reaching a certain level.

It’s important at this stage not to take anything off the table — your ability to use urgency to cut through process and red tape is relatively high whilst we’re responding, so use this time to test, measure, and learn new approaches that can help you survive — you will have to experiment and consider things you might have thought were impossible before to survive.

The key priority for product leaders now, is to have a clear hypothesis of the future of your market to inform your product strategy.

2. Supporting Our Product Teams

Leading Through Uncertainty

Leadership through uncertainty is never easy, although we’re lucky enough to be living in New Zealand with a great Prime Minster to role model how we should behave.

But it useful to remember that this is a time where everyone is being tested — for those still hiring, they’re needing to figure out how to do that over video; and at the other end of the spectrum, for those facing hard layoffs in their team, they’re probably figuring out how to do that with empathy over video too.

A useful frame here is to not think of your product team as just ‘working at home’ — they’re at home, during a crisis, trying to work and that’s a very different thing indeed

Startups are great at clearly articulating the challenges the whole company faces. In a startup everyone’s close to scenario planning and that can really help the whole team discover the upsides and downsides themselves; bring them on the journey; and add some cohesion back into a disconnected team.

Emotional Care

One of the key things I learned in startup teams is the power of personal and emotional check-ins, which is more important now than ever as we work remotely.

High-performing teams bring their whole selves to work, whereas in larger companies, people tend to only bring their “work selves” to work. But it’s the knowing what’s going on in people’s lives that help you become empathetic and understanding in a team.

Going through hard stuff brings teams together. Consider their personal situations — what’s your expectations of your team based on their own needs at home? Most people are in survival mode at the moment and possibly dealing with a partner losing their job, or struggling with home-schooling as a single parent, or not being able to see family who might be hospitalised with the virus. How can we be empathetic to personal situations whilst still being mindful of our own product timelines and priorities?

The most useful approach here is a quote I overheard on my wife’s teacher conference yesterday (thank you Welby Ings) — don’t think of your product team as just ‘working at home’ — they’re actually at home during a crisis, trying to work and that’s a very different thing indeed.

My point here is not to overlook the toll it’s taking on your team — consider all the ways you can show appreciation and how much you care and value them, especially if your team has never had to work remotely before.

On that note, there’s some good lessons we can take on remote work from startups, especially since many new ones are often born remote.

For startups with a single small team it’s easy, but what if you are sitting across multiple product teams and in a larger company? When you’re in the office, it’s easy just to walk the halls to stay connected to your teams, or maybe grab a few minutes with an executive in the kitchen in passing — but how does that change remotely?

I remember talking to Joel Gascoigne, founder of ‘remote-by-design’ startup, Buffer, as we skyped him into to talk to an accelerator cohort of product startups — his biggest lesson was that staying connected and over communicating is paramount when everyone’s remote.

Startups like Buffer often do all-hands meeting with leadership every week, and are clear on the detailed metrics of what’s currently going on to make teams feel comfortable and understand all the high-level decisions being made.

But they also teach us to we need to completely change our cadence. What- and how often- we communicate should be completely different to how we did it a month ago.

Firstround.com’s field guide reminds startup leaders that we might want to be in every stand-up for example, even if we don’t have to be, or we may wish to go two layers down for 1:1s in deep teams, or for product leaders who sit across many product teams.

Whilst remote work presents new challenges and opportunities, the biggest challenge here is how not to change the culture of your team just because the world is changing around you.

3. Product Discovery In Times of Crisis

Doubling Down On Customer

As startups, being great at product discovery is fundamental to the entire existence of the company, but as companies get bigger and product teams get more established, it’s easier to neglect product discovery as focus is rightly put into optimising and iterating what’s working in the core.

This crisis should serve as a ‘shot-in-the-arm’ opportunity to remind us all about product re-discovery as our environments change around us.

But product discovery in this new world is not without it’s challenges — discovery techniques we may have relied upon in the past such as customer interviews, may no longer work, or at least are harder since we can’t see body language cues whilst interviewing over video.

Understanding the impact on the changing world on your customer is most important in our discovery efforts—their world view and day-in-the-life likely looks quite different now and may do for the foreseeable future; customer personas that were valid before may need revisiting as customers’ futures look a little more uncertain.

Just like a startup, we should drop back down to pain point and customer discovery techniques rather than product/solution focussed techniques.

When I coach high-growth product teams, I use a Validated Product Strategy Loop model which I developed by looking at the best practices that other startup teams use, shown below.