Lesson #3 — Know where you’re going
Congrats — you’ve launched your product/service to market, kudos to you! Now comes the hard part — continuously reacting to your customer and market demands. Yes, you’ll have to change what you’ve spent the last few months sweating over…
It’s tempting to relax after your product launch. Customers may buy your product but they will inevitably ask for small changes or improvements. You want to appease your newly found, hard-won customers — so you may react quickly to every small request and end up running around like a headless chicken 🐔
“If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going” — Maya Angelou
This is the time to keep calm and start building processes, structure and develop strategies within your tech team. You can’t build everything all at once and not all requests are equally important. That’s when your product and operations managers truly shine (see Lesson #4) ✨
Actionable Advice — How do you know where to go?
Hire a Product Manager early — They will curate a solid long-term product vision, prioritise what features to build and cut out the rest. At the very least, they will analyse customer feedback to determine what features are essential for mass adoption and what is “nice to have”. Great PMs are truly hard to find but they are essential to your success.
Consider your growth opportunities — One big mistake that startups make is limiting their product to one niche use case. Of course, you need a beachhead market or initial target customer at the beginning of your journey but that can’t be the end game. Inevitably, as your market saturates, you will need to find new pastures to graze your cash cow. If your product is hard coded for one customer segment, it will be difficult to expand and expensive to change.
Do not build for a single customer — Every business is different, they all run differently and have a slightly different focus. This is why there isn’t just one supermarket, search engine or car manufacturer. However, if you customise your product perfectly for your biggest customer, you may end up building an internal tool just for them and not the addressable market. Search for the commonalities and build configuration into your product or risk being boxed into one client’s requirements.
Identify the gaps in your team — Are you missing a critical function in your business? Are there gaps in your team’s knowledge? This could be fundraising, data science, regulatory or even product-specific. Once you have identified these areas — begin pulling together a hiring plan based on milestones to get you there. Recruiting top talent always takes longer than you think.
Recommended Reading: Blitzscaling (Reed Hoffman and Chris Yeh) + The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson, Tim Ferriss)
Take me back to the Startup CTO Handbook >
Go to Lesson #4 - Implement a Product Development Process
This guide originally appeared on Medium, you can find the original here.