#strategy

Most companies stumble across a market with a problem and spend most of their early-stage investment on finding the solution. So, while you can be strategic about choosing the right market and problem (mostly by pivoting to different problems that your target market is facing, or solving the same problem for a different target market), most companies leave this up to luck. What should never be left to luck is the discovery of a solution for your market. This is where great product management principles and operations can make or break a startup, and much of the time this means prioritising the right solutions and finding the best way to tackle them.

Startup leaders are constantly facing decisions of whether they should build something themselves, or buy an out-of-the-box third-party solution. I believe startups should be biased against building anything inessential that doesn’t pose a legitimate opportunity to create a competitive advantage. In other words: only do what you’re positioned to do better than anyone else.

Products with product-market fit are products that have found an adequately sized market that they can be sold into. It’s more of a spectrum than a binary state — some products are more suitable for their market than others.

The best product teams I’ve worked with embrace the iterative nature of software development. Instead of committing to roadmap items, they commit to high-level, long-term goals. These goals are the focus of one or more teams for at least a year, and teams work towards these goals by tackling small chunks of work and constantly re-prioritising and re-thinking their approach.

In SaaS, your customers repurchase your product every month, quarter, or year. Your product should improve at this same pace. Renewals are so automated they feel like a passive process. But this is a false sense of security. Every time a customer pays, they should receive compelling value. This week, we explore why and how startups should operationalise their investment in software development.

While this is a word that often comes with negative connotations, I believe that great products, particularly in the B2B world, are usually very opinionated. They come with a strong view of how they should be used, and how the problem they are solving should be solved. These products differentiate themselves from the herd and disrupt incumbents by doing things differently. Many B2B SaaS products are simply automated workflows built from the opinionated views that you should solve that problem in this specific way.