Bootstrapper's Paradise

Pendo's feature adoption report tells us that 80% of product development is wasted.

This means product development processes everywhere have a long way to go to becoming more effective.

When's the last time your team evaluated how many of your customers are using those latest features?

Related Post - https://nxtstep.io/daily/80-percent-waste/

Find Product-Market Fit Faster with my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/fit/

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I wanna talk to you about is a rather shocking statistic as it pertains to product development and its level of effectiveness. So as a B2B SaaS consultant, I help a lot of my clients with getting more out of their product development process. . My long suspicion was that a significant portion of product development was not particularly effective.

What I mean by that is the process of figuring out what we're planning to build next, building it, shipping it, and then measuring its effectiveness probably was missing. Most of the time upon doing a little bit more research from a company called Pendo, who does essentially feature adoption work, so they have software that helps you solve this as a challenge for SaaS companies.

They released what they call their feature adoption report, and in it they explain that up to 80% of SaaS product features are either rarely or never used. Which is shocking to me. Well, maybe not that shocking because I see this work all the time, but it's, when you put it in perspective in terms of the effectiveness of the process, that's pretty poor level of performance and seemingly on average for a lot of product development companies, for a lot of SaaS companies, that the vast majority of their efforts are.

So I want to try to interpret what I think this statistic really means, to put it in context for you if you're on a product development team, and that to me, what that looks like in terms of what's actually happening at your company is that 80% of what you're investing into product development, which includes a lot, product teams, engineering teams, design testing, all of that effort is essentially a total.

So from a financial perspective, it's a pretty poor investment and very low rate of return. Secondly, 80% of your backlog, which is a lot of what we are all managing from in terms of where we're going next with the product, essentially amounts to useless or very low value add feature set. If 80% of what's ultimately being shipped into these products.

Rarely or never used. That means your backlog is full of junk, essentially, and that's not gonna make your product any better. In fact, quite the opposite, eight outta 10 features that you ship are more than likely to make your product experience worse. I talk about this a lot as well too, because if most of what you're shipping is not making your product experience better, whatever you ship, that doesn't make your product experience better.

It makes it worse because you're adding functionality that people are not using. So you're cluttering their experience up. You keep adding features that don't add value for them sooner rather than later. They're gonna wind up with a feature set that isn't really offering them a ton of value, and it's definitely getting worse.

So you end up ruining your product experience. So anyway, I wanted to share this statistic with you because I think it's pretty alarming and I think this should cause product teams everywhere to look more inward.  as it pertains to what is the level of effectiveness of your product development process, because none of this, to me, sounds particularly effective.

In fact, this sounds awfully wasteful and ineffective. So my question for you, and what I wanna challenge you or leave you with today is that I want you to ask yourself, when's the last time you evaluated? The latest set of product features that you shipped into your SaaS or whatever type of product you're building to measure its level of effectiveness, as in how many of your customers are using it and how frequently are they using it.

That should give you an idea whether or not they're getting value out of it. If they're not, you need to make some big changes to your product development process.

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

Absolute numbers are almost irrelevant when it comes to your customer.  

What really matters are relative numbers to what your SaaS product is saving them.

Related Article - https://nxtstep.io/daily/is-10k-expensive/

Get started with finding product-market fit faster with my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/fit/

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is the fact that absolute numbers are almost irrelevant when it comes to your B2B SaaS. And why I want to talk to you about relativity here is what really matters. Your numbers need to be relative to something, and more importantly, anchor to something.

Otherwise, you're gonna be missing the right context you need in order to build a effective pricing strategy for your B2B SaaS product. Now, this is all in terms of a concept, which to. Is by far one of the most important and critical success factors for your B2B SaaS, and that's building ROI and a path to profitability into what it is, what you're doing, and trying to grow and scale your B2B SaaS product.

But from your customer's perspective, that return on investment is what really matters for every dollar they invest. How many dollars are they getting back? That's what I mean when I say return on investment, whatever they're contributing toward. , whatever they need to pay in order to gain access to your product, what are they getting back in return?

It should be time or money. And time is money. You just need to figure out how much of their time translates to how much money. Now when I say relative numbers are much more important than absolute numbers, that's because you need the context in order to be able to determine and calculate the return on investment.

For example, if I asked you whether or not $10 is expensive, well, it's gonna depend. Who I'm speaking about, right? For a working professional with a high paying job? No, probably not For a child, yes. Probably. I mean, I guess it depends on the kid, but still you take my point, right? So the relative numbers on the other hand are where you're going to be able to build ROI into a pricing strategy for your product.

Now, there's other factors as well too, but for the sake of this conversation. It depends on how much you're saving your customer. If you're saving your customer a hundred dollars, then $10 is gonna look like a solid investment to them, and that's the relative numbers. But if you're saving your customer a thousand dollars, a hundred dollars by the same token, is gonna also look very attractive to them.

Both of these instances, there's a 10X return kind of designed into this experience from a pricing strategy perspective. So that's what I mean when I say relative numbers. And absolute numbers taken outta context really don't. So I want you to think about this as you're figuring out how to design, return, a positive, strong return on investment into the pricing strategy for your B2B SaaS product so that your customer receives the kind of return that they're looking for for your product to go viral.

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

Most B2B SaaS companies I consult with are missing a critical success factor that I call a problem worth solving.

Let's discuss what it is so you can determine whether or not it's missing for your B2B SaaS.

Episode Transcript

 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I wanna talk to you about is the missing critical success factor that most unsuccessful B2B SaaS companies have yet to figure out. Now, when I consult to various B2B SaaS companies that need my help because they're stuck somewhere, most of the time, the biggest missing factor is what I refer to is a problem worth solving.

These companies have not figured out essentially what that. That's terminology that I use rather frequently to mean a couple of key components that are really critical for your B2B SaaS company in order to be successful. So I want to talk about first, ultimately, what it looks like if you've found one.

So, if you're in a position where you have identified a problem we're solving for your B2B SaaS, to me what that means is, number one, you know exactly who has the. A very specific persona. You can identify, set individual at a target market, customer, you know the title, you know what they do, and more importantly, you know, the problems and challenges they have trying to accomplish what it is they're trying to do.

So that's number one. Number two, you know the impact that this problem causes, this specific person. And when I say that, what I mean is, you know, how expensive it. And expensive can be in the terms of lost time and lost money, and lost time is lost money. So you know those details as well too. You can measure them, you can quantify them.

They're pretty impactful to your target market. Customers operation is a big problem that they need solved. So that's number two. The third one, this is a critical factor as well, is you know, how ineffective the existing solution that they're trying to leverage to solve this problem is, You know what they're trying to do to try to solve that big problem, and you know how well it isn't working, meaning there is opportunity for you to solve that problem in a better way.

If you have achieved these things, I would say you have found a, what I prefer to as a problem, or solving, but not before that. So if you haven't uncovered that for your B2B SaaS and you're stuck or you're unhappy with where you're at or you're trying to scale, and it isn't. I would evaluate this criteria first because this is a really critical, important factor to achieve first before you're able to get to where you ultimately want to go.

And whatever your B2B SaaS product can do or can't do at the moment is really irrelevant. Any success that you're gonna have before you've identified what I've just referred to as a problem we're solving is simply gonna be cause of dumb luck.

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

Let's talk about how to get your B2B SaaS business on a path to profitability ASAP.

Related Post - https://nxtstep.io/daily/profitability-and-the-10x-effect/

Deeper Dive on SaaS Economics - https://nxtstep.io/blog/how-the-world-of-saas-economics-is-changing/

For help with reaching product-market fit faster, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/fit/

Episode Transcript
Hey folks. Sean here and today. What I wanna talk to you. Is the level of importance in designing a path to profitability for your B2B SaaS business? Now, being profitable has any number of different advantages, but there are many startups out there not following this strategy and getting themselves in trouble.

We've talked a lot about Uber and how. When they came to their ipo, they were pretty direct about the fact that they may never have a path to profitability. Economically. That model just doesn't make any sense to me, and for a million reasons, I recommend you stay away from it. We see what that can become with companies also like WeWork, whose IPO was ultimately canceled because they ultimately were trying to do the same thing.

So why one was able to move forward and the other wasn't auto. I can't answer that question, but regardless, I think that points to the fact that that strategy's not great. So why do you want to be profitable? . Some of the most obvious reasons and important ones are, number one, you can ultimately fund your own growth, so you can move at your own pace.

You can grow as fast or as conservatively as you would like to, but.  two and three are that you can maintain maximum control as well as you can stand a benefit from the majority of the rewards of your efforts because you aren't making a mess of your cap table by bringing in a ton of investors trying to figure things out, especially on the earlier side, right?

I'd rather you have a lot of that mapped out before you might need something to grow from there, and that's akin to like starting the fire and then looking for gasoline if you want to. Larger, generate more heat, whatever, right? Not necessarily to start the fire from the beginning. I think you can do that yourself by getting a strong value proposition designed around an ideal target market.

Now, I wanna talk to you about a tactic that I've used several times rather successfully in order to get my software businesses to profitability as soon as possible, and it's something that I call the 10 x effect. Now, the gist here is, . Leveraging the 10 x effect means that for your target market customer, you're going to figure out how to improve upon the solution that they're using today by a factor of 10.

Now, when I say solution today, that can be another piece of software that can be done by people, that can be a services business, whatever it is they're using to solve their problem. That's what you gotta be better then, and through discovery, you can figure that out. So if you find. Their top problem, how they're trying to solve that today and how effectively that works.

You can figure out whether or not you can do that better by a factor of. . Now, some examples of what category that might fall into could be something like faster, cheaper, better. In that if you can do it 10 times faster, 10 times cheaper, or 10 times better, you've successfully achieved the 10 x effect, and that puts you on a strong path to profitability because there's gonna be plenty of room there in order for you to offer the service design and build the solution, deliver it in a way.

Makes your customer extremely happy because you're providing with a very strong return, which means there's gonna be enough room in there for you to be able to generate and build a highly profitable and successful SaaS business.

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

The bottlenecks that sink most SaaS products are running out of time or money.  Let's talk about how to solve for those to increase your odds of success.

Related Post - https://nxtstep.io/daily/everything-comes-down-to-time-and-money/

Deeper Dive on SaaS Economics - https://nxtstep.io/blog/how-the-world-of-saas-economics-is-changing/

For help with reaching product-market fit faster, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/fit/

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I wanna talk to you about is a better, more sustainable path to building a successful SaaS product that can ultimately turn into a healthy business. I've been talking a lot about SaaS economics lately. And I've been beating up quite a bit, the sassy unicorn model that's startups that are trying to vie for ultimately a valuation of greater than a billion dollars.

I've talked about the ridiculously low odds of being able to do that successfully and why I think people should not vie for that or attempt that strategy. But one I wanna talk about today instead is essentially what you should do in place of a strategy like that. Cause that is so ineffective.

essentially, what's the better way to do it? And I wanna talk more about that and my coming episodes are gonna dive in even deeper as well too. But before I do, I wanna talk about ultimately what are the biggest bottlenecks to success here, and ultimately why the majority of those startups that are trying to vie for that unicorn status ultimately fail.

And it's two particular bottlenecks. It's time, it's money, or it can be both, as in most of. Either run out of time money, or both of those two de limiting factors in terms of being able to achieve success with their SaaS product or their startup company as such. I really think those are what we need to treat like those are at the root of ultimately what prevents those attempts from being successful.

I've been there many times with the study and the research that I've done around how many, just how many of these companies have.  actually relatively close to reaching product market fit when they run out of one or both of these resources, which is super unfortunate. This timer starts if you go down the traditional path of raising through the investor community where you need to figure it out by a period of time.

And I think that pressure is both unhealthy and also leads to significantly worse outcomes for these projects. So I've made that point. What I wanna talk about now is what's a better way to do that? Well, first and foremost, I wanna put control. I wanna take control out of the hands of the investor community indirectly through what they're providing you with in order to run your company.

Because in my opinion, there's so much wrong with that model. But I want to give that control back to you. I want you to have the time that you need, and I want you to have the budget that you need to invest successfully and build a SaaS product. Or this as a business, but with you in control essentially the whole time.

So I wanna share a strategy that I know works because I've leveraged it myself to build several of my own product companies, and that's, I recommend folks work in the industry for which they're intending to build their SaaS or the product in this question. In this case, this gives you the opportunity to continually learn more about the.

So you'll be regularly doing research and getting greater context around the problems worth solving as I like to refer to them. But at the same time, you're solving for these elder bottlenecks because you will be earning what you need to essentially earmark what you can invest into your project.  as well as enabling your lifestyle.

You don't have to put your life entirely on hold and eat only ramen noodles every night for however long until you crash and burn, which is what happens to most of the companies trying this model. It will be much more sustainable. Right. So that solves for kind of the money element. Let's talk about the time piece as well too.

Now, a certain amount of discovery. A really critically important factor when you're starting a project like this. So working in industry is gonna give you an opportunity to gather some of that naturally as you're doing the work that that job essentially requires. But at the same time, you are gonna have a balance of time and the choice in terms of what you want to do with it.

So with that balance of time that you. Outside of working in industry, you can invest that in your project as little or as much as you want over time. So this essentially stops the clock on the time limit as well as it puts you in control of the funding source that goes into your project until you can reach a certain level of scale or progress, and then ultimately decide whether or not you want to shift the balance of working in industry and working on your SaaS product and building that into a successful.

I think this transition and this strategy makes a lot more sense, and like I said earlier, I've leveraged it to build my product companies, both staff geek and podcast chef, using this very same model with much greater success and bonus points. I've also done it without any outside investment from the investor community.

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

A study done by CBInsights tells us that as little as 1.3% of startups might reach so called unicorn ($1B+) status.

Let's talk about why anyone would ever take these odds when you do do WAY better at a casino and what you should probably do instead.

Study - https://www.cbinsights.com/research/venture-capital-funnel-2/

Related Article on SaaS Economics - https://nxtstep.io/blog/how-the-world-of-saas-economics-is-changing/

Free 5 Day Email Course on How to Reach Product-Market Fit Faster - https://nxtstep.io/fit/

Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about are the economics of SaaS startups that try to reach unicorn status and why. If that is an approach that you're taking, you really shouldn't because statistically speaking, trying to reach unicorn status as a startup is not only worse than gambling, actually considerably worse than gambling.

It's about as bad as playing the lottery, so it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense to dedicate all of your time, effort, and. To try to reach something that essentially is borderline unattainable. So let me share a little bit more detail. Before we go into that though. I wanna be on the same page about what I mean by unicorn status startup, and the definition, loosely speaking, is usually referred to as a privately held startup company with a value that reaches at least 1 billion.

That's usually what people mean when they're referring to unicorn status for a startup. . Now, the question I had beyond that is just how difficult is that? So ultimately, I was able to track down a study done by CB Insights that found that of a study done from over a thousand US seed tech companies, or 1,119 in fact.

only 15 ever reached that level of status. And if you look at that from a statistical perspective, it winds up being about 1.3%, which is ridiculously low numbers.  now looking at that, another way of failure rate of 98.7%, which are pretty ridiculously low odds to try to reach a level like that. Now, something else you might be thinking as well.

98.7% of those companies never reached $1 billion startup status, but they might have exited for a lower number than that, which is still impressive and agreed, right? Some of the balance of that number did reach an exit, a successful exit that didn't quite reach that level of status, but it's probably a way lower number than you're thinking, like less than 10.

I added up the numbers from that research article, and ultimately the numbers are probably a lot lower than you're expecting now, just for kicks by comparison, uh, because I wanted to actually look at some statistics of winning at different games if you were literally gambling at a casino . And the one that I looked at is the one that I've played from time to time, and that's blackjack.

Now, blackjack, if you are familiar with this as a concept, Plenty of people refer to it as essentially having the best odds in a casino, so to speak. But even at that, the odds of winning at a blackjack hand any given hand, are typically reported to be over 40%. So now if you compare those two numbers, that's a pretty wide margin, right?

Even if we're considering startups that have a successful exit and don't reach billion dollar startup or unicorn, Gambling looks way more attractive by comparison if you just look at the numbers, which is just bonkers . So anyway, my question for you and what I wanted to talk about here today is really why anyone would want to try to do business if your odds of success were that low.

There's a better way to approach this, in my opinion, and that's really to vie for profitability, right outta. For your SaaS business or your product company. Now, it doesn't mean you're gonna reach it immediately, and it also might mean you need one or more rounds of funding, which I think is totally understandable.

But you really should be vying for profitability sooner rather than later, and not reinvesting literally everything, meaning that your company is gonna have continuous negative earnings until you reach this like mythological status that almost no one ever reaches.

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

What do SaaS unicorns like Uber and Twitter have in common with Ponzi schemes?  Turns out quite a bit.

I want to do a deeper dive on SaaS economic models and why designing a path to profitability is critical for the long-term success of your SaaS product.

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

Mike Benson built and grew Warmup Inbox from the ground up, a product that is used by thousands of companies and was acquired by private equity for millions of dollars.

Following his successful exit, Mike now searches for gaps in markets that venture capitalists won’t touch and builds sustainable profitable businesses within them. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Product Launch:

• The process of bootstrapping a SaaS company.
• How to know if a product is scaleable.
• The biggest challenges in the SaaS industry.
• How to find out if your product will succeed online.
• Early signals that a SaaS website will be succesful.
• How to know which search words to rank in.

Resources:

• Dabble Ventures
• TransPerfect
• Sticky
• Warmup Inbox
• Lemlist
• Google Optimize
• NxtStep
• Podcast Chef

Connecting with Mike Benson:

• LinkedIn

Connecting with the host:

• Sean Boyce on LinkedIn
• Sean Boyce by Email

Quotables

• 08:24 - “I said ok can I make the product better, just like a checkbox of is this product better? And then can I make it 10 times cheaper and one thing that I didn’t realize people would write in for Warmup Inbox and be like why is this so cheap is this legit? And that would be a customer support question that would come in a lot and I’m realizing that if you can actually get people to ask that question you are on to something.”
• 09:02 - “One of the biggest issues in SaaS right now is it’s truly a race to the bottom like you might see on Twitter people saying hey you copied my idea or I can’t believe there are so many copycats it’s really because these products are so simple to make.”
• 11:54 - “If you make it a goal for someone to ask you why this is so cheap, you’re clearly onto something because without probably knowing it what they’re giving away is that basically, I need this and I can only find it elsewhere much more expensive so they’re almost underscoring for you, there’s a huge opportunity here I just need a quick sanity check before I dive in.”
• 21:34 - “It can’t hurt to try to start a company for a couple of weeks and just see what roadblocks you run into.”

Free Email Course - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/course

Private Coaching - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/coaching

Bootstrapper's Paradise - https://bootstrappersparadise.com/

No and low code tools continue their explosion of growth.  They are becoming more specialized and capable. 

I believe this to be because software engineering has been the bottleneck on development teams for some time. 

While custom engineering isn't going anywhere, the future of the role is likely to change.  Let's talk about the opportunities that might create for product teams.

If you want to find product-market fit faster, sign up for my free 5 day email course here - https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here and today what I want to

talk to you about is why I think software engineering

as a skill set is becoming slightly more commoditized and

what that might mean for product teams everywhere.

So I'm sure my product teams are

fairly familiar with this, but for the

longest time now, the biggest bottleneck product

development has typically been the engineering component.

As in it takes the longest amount of

time in order to go from our designs

and our required experiments to actually getting those

features and functionality into the application itself.

As such, over time, a significant amount of

resources have been placed here trying to figure

out how to do so faster.

And there's been all kinds of invented models and

new tools that have come to market, enabling us

to be able to speed this process up.

Here everything from the Lean Startup kind of revolution

all the way to and through what is commonly

referred to as no code or low code platforms,

which I've dived into and pretty significantly as well.

Also I've leveraged them for a number

of my client projects and we've built

some pretty comprehensive and impressive products using

some of these platforms like Bubble. Bubble.

IO is kind of an ecosystem, if you will, of

being able to build almost an entire application, if not

an entire application, that has the look and feel of

being able to be pretty significantly customized, but is largely

a no code or low code platform, meaning that you

don't really need to write significant amount or really any

code at all in order to create the kind of

experience that you're looking for.

Which again, if you are heavy with tuning into

some of my content, you'll understand how important I

feel that that is for us and our role

as product leaders to make sure that the experience

that our product ultimately delivers is optimal and matches

essentially solving the customer's top problems and pain points.

So because that's the area of focus, it's really

important if we have an opportunity to place most

of our resources and focus there because that's ultimately

what we're doing on the back end in terms

of how the technology works.

And self admittedly, I'm an engineer myself and I have

a lot of respect for the work that engineers do.

However, having said that, recognizing the fact that

it has been the bottleneck, these applications have

grown significantly in that their popularity has grown

pretty aggressively because this has continued to be

a challenge for product teams, especially when looking

to do something new or create new features

and functionality and want to speed up the

product development production process.

These tools have enabled us to be able

to do that and that pattern continues.

Very recently, I've read about a product

called cumul.io, which has raised Series A

over $10 million very recently.

And that is a tool that enables

you to incorporate some essentially more advanced

analytics and bi type tools for business

intelligence capabilities into SaaS platforms.

But to do so yet again as a low code platform,

which is pretty advanced capabilities as it pertains to low code

or no code platforms, but an all important one because still

yet a bottleneck on the demand side is how do we

process and get the best type of information out of all

of the data that we have now?

Because there's an overwhelming amount of data in

the world and not enough processing power or

capabilities to really better understand and extract information

from it, which is typically the desire.

So products like Familio which are specialized,

and bubble which are more generic, are

providing us with essentially an ecosystem worth

of options when it comes to building.

Now, there's still a place

obviously for custom engineering, right?

If you need a product to scale as aggressively as

something heavy like a salesforce or a HubSpot or something

like that, your NoCode platform is not typically going to

be able to handle that type of volume, at least

not yet, and may be able to do so eventually

if this pattern and trend continues.

But for now, your custom engineering will enable

you to benefit from operational efficiency at scale.

However, before you get there, when you're trying

to experiment and you're trying to test new

products and things like that, if you want

to speed up the product development process.

So far the trend has been no code and

low code platforms seem to be here to stay.

They continue to be able to raise money,

they continue to be adopted by product development

teams and they continue to enable teams to

move faster in the development cycles.

So what I'm trying to explain for you here is

that how I see this pattern developing over the past

few years and where I think that it's going and

then I want to talk more about what I think

that means for developing product teams and the changes that

might become so if this trend continues.

What it will mean for product teams, in my opinion,

is that as I've thought about how it gets broken

down before in terms of responsibilities on a product team,

I usually do so in three different ways.

I would put the what we are intending to build and

why we are intending to build it into the product category.

So product managers and product people

who are interacting with customers and

users to do research and discovery.

It's our responsibility to figure out what the priority

is, to build what the problems we're solving are,

where the obvious unmet needs are those types of

things, and then work with our engineering or development

teams in order to prioritize those for development, which

I would consider to be the how.

As in how are we going to capitalize on that

opportunity, how are we actually going to build that, how

are we going to bring that experience to market?

So that's where I draw the line most of the

times, the what and the why lives on the product

side, the how lives on the engineering side.

What I'm continuing to see more of, especially

in the early stages of this work, is

that the how is becoming more commoditized.

And I think that is happening because it's, for

quite a while now, continue to be the bottleneck,

as in folks have wanted to move faster.

Everything else is accelerating, yet that's

what's taking the most time.

So much of the innovation has gone into that space

in terms of figuring out how to speed it up.

And I think that's where we're seeing a

lot of this development come fro...

Without a clear vision for your organization and a mission for your product, your team will get confused.

Let's talk about how to set them and see some popular examples so you can better understand the value here.

To find product market fit faster, sign up for my free 5 day email course – https://nxtstep.io/fit

Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here and today what I want to talk

to you about is how to realize your product vision.

So more recently, I've been working with a few clients

and helping them realize a vision for their product.

Now there's a number of variables here.

There's vision statements, there's mission statements.

I want to talk about subtle difference

between the two of those and those

can be set at the organization level.

They can also be set for your product.

Now the way I typically like to see it

done is setting the vision statement for for the

organization and a mission statement for the product.

And I like the two to support one

another, as in if you are making progress

towards the mission for your product, that should

support the vision for your organization.

That's the way I like to see them connected.

I think they're really important for keeping your team on

the same page about what you should be doing and

how you should be making the world a better place

with what it is essentially the purpose that you've set

for your product and then the vision for your organization.

Now this isn't always set and when I run into

some issues with the clients that I help building and

scaling product companies, I end up finding that this is

one of the problems that I run into fairly consistently,

as in the vision is somewhat unclear.

There's also some confusion back and forth between what

is the vision of the organization versus what is

the mission of the product or vice versa.

So I want to talk about some examples of those

and then how you should leverage each when you're going

about making positive change at your product organization.

To help with my research on this topic,

I've had a number of conversations with Chat

GPT, which has been very helpful.

I've incorporating that more and more into my routine

and I'd encourage you to do the same.

But as part of that, I started focusing on

some of the largest, more popular organizations out there

that are relatively well known, like Google and Microsoft.

And I started researching both their vision mission

statements for both the organization and their products.

As such, I want to describe kind of each

for you as an example which would help you

figure out what yours should be for your product.

And then I want to talk about how you should

ultimately realize progress towards them because it's not just important

to have them, it's important to understand how to leverage

them and how to realize them and when they should

come into play when you're going about trying to improve

your product and succeed at your organization.

So when I looked up for Google how it

would define essentially Google's vision statement, the example that

I came back with is create a world where

every person has access to the information and the

opportunities they need to succeed.

So that's the vision statement and if you realize

from that example, it's a pretty lofty goal, right?

And it's one that isn't

necessarily all that obtainable.

Like we might want to cure world hunger

or end homelessness or something like that.

These are characteristics, I would say, of a solid vision

statement as and it may not be something that is

easily achievable, but it is a lofty but a monumental

goal if it's something that you can achieve.

So it's a future state that you

want to desire to make progress towards.

I know Lexus at one point had

the passionate pursuit of perfection, right?

So if you think about that or you're breaking that one

down, lexus may be desiring to build the perfect car.

Are they ever going to build a perfect car?

Probably not.

How would we even know someone

had built a perfect car, right?

But I like the idea and the

concept of that being the goal, right?

If you're trying to achieve or you have the

passion pursuit of perfection in mind at all times

in the work that you do, then that means

that if you come anywhere near that, you're probably

going to produce some pretty impressive results.

Now that's the vision statement.

Now again, I recommend a vision statement being set

largely at the organization level and I think the

members of your organization should understand what that is

and then be willing to support it.

It should be something that makes sense and much of

the work, if not all of the work that you

do at your organization to support progress towards that vision.

So at the same time, I wanted to dive

a little bit deeper and specifically talk about an

example of what might be a mission statement.

But mission statement I would recommend kind

of being set at that product level.

So not necessarily the organization, but again at the

product and then the product in particular I'm going

to share with you, since I shared that as

a vision statement is Google Search.

So from the search engine, the mission I would

say for the Google search product, as I found

in the research that I did, is to provide

the most relevant and useful information to users.

There are different variations of that but you

kind of get the idea there, right?

And what I find particularly helpful about

the mission statement set at a particular

product level is it more specific to

what you're doing and managing that product.

And if you are continuously making

that product better, it should enable

you to continuously fulfill that mission.

As in, you know, at a static point

in time, you may currently have the best

product that's capable of doing that.

But as technology evolves, as things in the

market change, as more products become available, you

will need to continuously be making progress in

order to be realizing and fulfilling that mission,

right, to support that grander vision.

Now that's some examples of each.

What I want to talk to you about as well

too, is how to leverage these in the work that

you're doing with your team on a daily basis, how

that can help clear up confusion and what it looks

like when you're able to achieve those results.

So having a vision and mission statement for both

your organization and your product will be critical for

ensuring that your team remains on the same page

as you're, trying to make your product better and

enable your organization to become more successful.

If you don't have those, you're likely to introduce

additional confusion into what it is you're doing on

a daily basis and the progress that you're trying

to build towards in the long term.

So if you haven't set these, set

them, but set them as a team.

It should be a collaborative effort because you want

to ensure that your team can get inspired and

get behind both of these concepts as well too.

If you ...