[HN Gopher] Product-focused and sales-focused companies
___________________________________________________________________
Product-focused and sales-focused companies
Author : asplake
Score : 192 points
Date : 2021-04-18 10:58 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (itamargilad.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (itamargilad.com)
| mwcampbell wrote:
| When reading the caricature of a product-focused company, I
| couldn't help but think of NeXT. NeXT was before my time (I was
| about 8 when the first NeXT computer came out, and completely
| unaware of what they did until decades later), but I've read
| about them and watched their first launch event [1]. It's obvious
| from that presentation that they were state-of-the-art, way ahead
| of their time. But from what I've read, NeXT computers didn't
| sell very well. I'd be interested in any detailed postmortem of
| NeXT's failures.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92NNyd3m79I
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The impression I got at the time was that NeXT was selling a
| fairly high-end Unix workstation with features that made it a
| better desktop PC than contemporary workstations, but lacked
| the enterprise sales experience to hit most of the Unix
| workstation market (which also had considerable vendor lock-in,
| so it was hard to get people to switch) while having a price
| point that, despite the features, made it a very hard sell as a
| PC replacement. The nonstandard storage on the original NeXT
| probably didn't help, but that waa addressed quickly with the
| second generation machines which had more traditional storage.
| HugoDaniel wrote:
| meh, a not-so-kind but equally apt critic can also be made for
| the case that the article is trying to promote, the so called
| "market-driven" companies.
|
| most edge funds companies can be considered almost 100% market
| driven...
| rancar2 wrote:
| The historical reasons for sales-driven and product-led was due
| to internal politics. As noted in the article, these are
| internally focused, as most employees work "in" the business and
| not "on" the business. I would recommend using different wording
| than the article, as Market-Focused will lead to focus on
| competitors. This is again leads to focus on the wrong party, not
| the right party and the reason why the organization should exist
| and consume resources including people's/employees' time.
|
| Mission-driven in both for-profit and non-profit context works
| very well to focus the team on the right party (customer,
| patients, citizens, large enterprises in insurance, the local
| environment, etc. "target population") as the organization scales
| to provide value to the target population. A shared mission to
| ensure the fulfillment of the primary reason for the existence
| will ensure the team focuses on delivery of value to the right
| party, target population. However, the mission needs to provide
| enough value to justify its existence, and with three parts: (1)
| large value proposition, (2) large target population and (3)
| large unmet need, then you have a justification for the continued
| existence of the organization and the resources it consumes.
| jka wrote:
| Agree broadly with what you're saying; having a common mission
| is a good way to align on goals within a company and also with
| customers and community.
|
| It's debatable, but the phrase "target population" seems
| potentially non-ideal from a cultural perspective. To me that
| has some negative connotations, implying that the recipients
| might not be aware/participating/accepting. It feels like
| companies should want to support and encourage their audience,
| as opposed to pushing things onto them.
|
| Perhaps a minor point, but I think that if you develop a large
| organizational culture which begins to repeat various phrases
| or terms, then those words and the way they are perceived
| become significant (in proportion to the company's influence).
| rancar2 wrote:
| I fully agree that "target population" isn't the best
| wording. If you have a suggestion of another phrase in
| English that would be readily understood without further
| definition, please do share as I would love to find a better
| phrase than target population. I typically use just "target"
| but I was avoiding being ambiguous while attempting to be
| brief. Again, "target" also carries a lot of cultural baggage
| for its military associations.
|
| To go a bit deeper, underneath my comment is method of
| accomplishing a mission through organizational/program
| design, where a mission consists of:
|
| verb. target. outcome. measurement.
|
| * To maintain brevity in the above format, the "need" and the
| "how" may be implied in the mission statement but are
| typically not well covered by the above suggested mission
| statement format, but should be codified in a logical model
| of the programs/executable units of work.
|
| Examples of missions:
|
| 1. Living Goods = save. african kids'. lives. reducing child
| mortality.
|
| 2. One Arce Fund = get. african families. out of extreme
| poverty. increasing income.
|
| 3. Island Conservation = save. island species. from
| extinction. recovering species populations living.
|
| Definitions:
|
| 1.Verb = The measurable action of the program taking place on
| the target to achieve the outcome.
|
| 2. Target = The person/place/thing that is the served by the
| program.
|
| 3. Outcome = The measurable benefit that is expected for the
| target.
|
| 4. Measurement = The primary set of data being collected as
| an indication that the outcome is being achieved.
|
| Edit: formatting adjustments
| atat7024 wrote:
| Market we're aiming to serve.
|
| But these distinctions are just additional nuances to
| choose from in the same vein as the original debate.
| rancar2 wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion. Markets can be qualified and
| quantified in very different ways across different
| domains of knowledge. The general interpretation is a
| system, but a complex system is hard to measure a
| program's or organization's impact on it without
| investing more money in data tracking, which is beyond
| the scope of most all organizations outside of
| governments. I do eventually see that within governmental
| level datasets will be able to quantify outcomes, but we
| are still a ways off that point in time.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| yeah, "served people/population/society-segment" sounds
| better
| jka wrote:
| Yep - and "support" is another possibility.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Ultimately these are just generalizations. Your company can be
| focused on both and regularly fail to execute either.
|
| What the execs know is that all they need to do is generate
| profits. There are many tricks you can use to do that, even if
| you have shitty product that customers don't like. This is where
| established behemoths sometimes end up, to the point that people
| hate their brand, but use it anyway. At that point the customer
| is just poultry, and the company's focus becomes keeping foxes
| out of the hen house.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| There's a 3rd axis missing - Customer Centered which can and
| should drive both Product-led and Sales-driven.
|
| Both Product-led and Sales-driven alone are putting the cart
| before the horse. The horse is the customer first.
|
| When you do it right, you get all three!
|
| When you simply use a recipe book of heuristics without
| understanding anything about economics (btw a university
| Economics course teaches you next to NOTHING) and your particular
| market, then you are practicing Cargo-Cult Superstition business.
| You might as well strangle chickens and wave the entrails over
| your lobby door for all the good it will do you!
| yowlingcat wrote:
| You hit the nail on the head. Talking to the customer in some
| way shape or form should be the first step that informs whether
| you take a more product or sales led approach and more
| importantly /why/. Without a customer centric approach, all you
| end up with is (as you point out) a solution in search of a
| problem -- a poor place to be.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Once in my live I would love to work at a tech driven company.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Same, but for some reason it's rare for me to get interviews at
| the type of places.
| stedman wrote:
| Great clickbait, awful content
|
| Formula: 1. set up strawmen on either extreme 2. argue for the
| middle
|
| Being sales-led vs product-led is not about your specifying your
| "company DNA".
|
| It's about choosing the go-to-market strategy that maximizes your
| LTV:CAC.
|
| And as the market changes, so too can your GTM strategy.
|
| As evidence: HubSpot successfully transitioned their GTM from
| sales- to product-led. OpenViewVenture published a guide
| explaining it:
|
| https://openviewpartners.com/blog/hubspots-5-strategies-for-...
| motohagiography wrote:
| X-driven company is really a recruiting message, it's not a
| strategy. The _only_ thing that drives a company is its growth
| stage.
|
| tech + team = investment driven
|
| idea + team = investment driven
|
| investment + team = product driven
|
| revenue + product = sales driven
|
| investment + product = engineering driven
|
| revenue - product = acquisition driven
|
| A product is something someone both wants and pays for, otherwise
| it's just a technology. Might build this out, but it's pretty
| consistent.
|
| IMO, etc...
| [deleted]
| weeboid wrote:
| Ha, I got past the sales-driven company caricature, into the
| product led, and thought: "Well, like many things, it depends.
| "Which blend best suits the market?"
|
| Market driven companies, ta-da! Lol
| simon_kun wrote:
| How mission driven teams at FAANG build $1Tn+ market cap:
|
| 1. Product teams create utility at ~zero marginal cost per
| additional user
|
| 2. Platform teams drive distribution
|
| 3. Monetization teams convert utility to cash
|
| 4. GOTO 1
| thewarrior wrote:
| Never heard it put so succinctly. This should be higher up.
| polote wrote:
| - Facebook: Yeah more or less that
|
| - Apple: far from zero marginal cost per additional user
|
| - Amazon: far from zero marginal cost per additional user
|
| - Netflix : More or less works, if driven by the content they
| create. But not a product
|
| - Google: Has monopoly on Ads search, all others projects bring
| close to nothing
|
| Except Facebook, I don't see how 'zero marginal cost per
| additional user'-products have any impact of the revenue these
| company make
| rajacombinator wrote:
| How it really works, even (especially) at FAANG:
|
| 1. Get one thing right.
|
| 2. Sit back and make my monies.
| whack wrote:
| From what I've skimmed, the author blames sales-focused companies
| for being too obsessed with capturing value. And this is a bad
| thing.
|
| He also blames product-focused companies for being too obsessed
| with delivering value. And this is a bad thing.
|
| His silver bullet at the end seems to be that the company should
| be marked-focused. Which appears to be shorthand for both
| delivering value and capturing value. Ie, being sales-focused or
| product-focused is bad. Instead, you should strive to be BOTH!
|
| It seems analogous to me telling NFL coaches that being defense-
| focused is bad because they won't score very many points. And
| being offense-focused is also bad, because they will give up too
| many points. Instead, they should focus on BOTH!
|
| Maybe I'm being naive, but this seems a tad obvious, and not all
| that useful.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| It seems obvious in retrospect, but over-focusing on a single
| domain (sales, product, design, marketing, engineering) to the
| detriment of everything else is a common problem with first-
| time leaders. Inexperienced leaders tend to focus on their own
| background while downplaying the importance of topics they are
| less familiar with.
|
| The genesis of these problems is often the CEO or other
| executive's own background. A CEO who came from a sales
| background tends to give sales whatever they want at the
| expense of everything else. A CEO who started as an engineer
| might overengineer everything and neglect distribution. A CEO
| with a design background might focus too much on making a
| beautiful product while neglecting usability, engineering, and
| distribution.
|
| These are common traps for first-time leaders, especially those
| who have risen quickly through the ranks. It can take time to
| understand that balance is necessary.
| drc500free wrote:
| I've also seen the flip side of this. Sometimes the founder
| understands the need to hire and build for the other domains,
| but their own function remains immature because they rely on
| their own skill and don't know how to externalize it into a
| self sufficient department. They get the high level stuff
| right but don't have time for the details anymore.
| clairity wrote:
| sounds like a false dichotomy to make a naive point. define two
| extremes, label them bad, and label the middle good.
|
| i'd note that it's hard to go wrong delivering value to the
| customer first ("product-led"), then trying to capture some of
| that value for yourself later, because the key to the whole
| system is that there is some new value created that can be
| shared. the main danger is not being capitalized enough to
| eventually capture some of the value and sustain the business.
|
| sales-led tries to capture the value first, then deliver (some
| of) it to the customer, which can create misaligned incentives
| and a potentially antagonistic relationship, as it's hard to
| predict (and agree on) value in the future, and it's tempting
| to cheap out on the delivery.
|
| but importantly, both can work depending on the market
| dynamics. it's not strictly an either-or situation, which is
| the domain of the false dichotomy.
| felipellrocha wrote:
| It might seem obvious to you, but I've been in plenty of
| companies that focused on one or the other and wondered why
| things were always burning down.
|
| Sometimes there is value in stating the obvious, because it
| might not be that obvious to everyone.
| [deleted]
| spzb wrote:
| That was my takeaway too so if you're naive, you're not alone.
| crmd wrote:
| What's funny is that bullshit factories like McKinsey and BCG
| convert shallow insights such as this into billion dollar
| pipelines. You could turn this blog post into a PowerPoint
| presentation, and corporate boards will happily pay you $250k
| a pop to interview people and diagnose their company as too
| sales or product driven, with the recommendation to become
| market driven. Even the football offense/defense thing,
| delivered verbally during the board presentation, will be met
| with deep nods of understanding and help energize the room
| and make you look like a rockstar. Some of the board members
| will literally be thinking, "we need a CEO like this guy".
| Once their check clears, you give the same analysis to the
| next company down the road for another $250k.
| xmprt wrote:
| McKinsey are overpaid lifestyle coaches for companies.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Even if it's the placebo effect, if McKinsey can make
| organizations operate more effectively with pre-fab slide
| decks, then it's worth it. They are providing value to the
| organization.
| dasil003 wrote:
| The point is that probably 20% of the ICs at the company
| could diagnose the problem over a beer but management
| keeps such a stranglehold over access and narrative that
| only an overpaid consultant wearing a nice suit is
| acceptable politically.
| afarrell wrote:
| Sure. Similarly, the US government "knew" about 9/11 and
| Pearl Harbour hours before the planes hit anything. But
| understanding which signals to pay attention to and make
| decisions upon is genuinely a hard challenge of
| leadership.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Agreed. But are you saying McKinsey is better at that?
| mpyne wrote:
| For better or worse, McKinsey and outfits like them have
| an ability to package a given set of advice in a way that
| the needed audience will be more likely to heed. Partly
| because they can MBA the lingo, but also just from the
| imputed competence that comes from having spent a goddamn
| boatload on their brand name.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| That makes sense, and is a really good example of
| organizational cognitive dissonance.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
| ArnoVW wrote:
| Speaking from 11 years of consulting experience (and 5
| years of SaaS product dev BTW), when I was consultant we
| always used to say that the price was part of the medecine.
|
| People tend to clear their agenda and listen closely more
| easily if they think you are worth listening to. Hence the
| suits and ties. It's stupid, but it works.
| bob33212 wrote:
| The difference is that with football every single week you
| get to see the score and watch the defense and offense
| separately. So it is very obvious that your awesome offence
| didn't make up for your lack of a good defense. With a
| startup you can end up with the equivalent of the coach
| saying that although the defense never stopped a single play,
| the offense should have done a better job running out the
| clock, and that is why they lost. Or the coach saying that
| although the offense never got a single first down, the
| defense should have returned some of the interceptions for
| touchdowns and that is why they lost.
| oneplane wrote:
| It seems to me that picking any single extreme will leave you
| losing on other fronts. Market-focused has its own problems,
| for example because the market doesn't actually always know
| what it wants, needs or already has.
|
| Abstracting people into a 'business' with 'tech and business',
| interacting with other people that are 'market' is nice for
| pictures, but rarely tells the whole story, and oversimplifies
| things to the point where you can't make complete choices.
| ori_b wrote:
| As always: Reasonable and thoughtful beats all alternatives.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| There was a great article a few years ago about how Dell
| ditched all of its manufacturing to improve its balance sheet
| for Wall St analysts. In the process, they basically built up
| Taiwanese companies like Asus into competition at Dell
| shareholder expense.
|
| The CEO of one of the Taiwanese companies said something to the
| effect of "American managers like ratios, I prefer cash".
|
| Leadership is different than management. In a growing company
| if some McKinsey alum solves all of your problems with a
| spreadsheet and fancy PowerPoint, you're in trouble. Likewise,
| if some engineering team is setting money on fire building the
| platonic ideal of an application, you're in trouble. Good
| leaders marshal those resources to make the sum of the parts
| greater and better.
| musingsole wrote:
| Yeah, the message is to elevate the company's perspective to be
| aware of both sides of the transaction in which it takes part.
|
| Life is always a game of balance. It may be obvious that you
| have to balance giving/taking as a business, but I've never
| seen business leaders talk this way. My experience is inline
| with the article in that businesses seem to go all in on one or
| the other as opposed to harmonizing the 2.
| cjblomqvist wrote:
| A big reason for this, in particularly with big companies, is
| that managing them is like steering a tanker. Do you want to
| stop ASAP you need to do full thrust the other way for a
| while.
|
| Obviously not the perfect metaphor, but for sure a part of it
| reader_mode wrote:
| >Maybe I'm being naive, but this seems a tad obvious, and not
| all that useful.
|
| IMO I've often seen extreeme scenarios and then a reactionary
| 180 swing to the other extreeme, it's usefull to recognise that
| both approaches are extreemes.
|
| It might be obvious to you but I constantly see devs that fail
| to recognise sales focus has value - like we need to ship
| feature X by Y to get client Z otherwise the opportunity is
| gone. I'd say 2/3 devs I've worked with will immediatly push
| back with concerns such as long term maintainability,
| scalability, etc. None of those would be a blocker for the sale
| or the initial customer, and once you land the customer you'll
| have the budget to go back and fix it - but yeah still a
| deathmatch to get those through sprint planning.
|
| And queue jaded devs here claming "they do it because they know
| once it's commited it will never get fixed", honestly whenever
| I come up with actual problems and solutions I can't remember
| being turned down (deffered a couple of times, still got to do
| it eventually) - I've worked for 2 startups, and 4 enterprise
| teams.
|
| So if you're not getting space to do this kind of improvements
| and care about code quality - maybe consider changing your
| workplace.
| goalieca wrote:
| > and once you land the customer you'll have the budget to go
| back and fix it
|
| There's always one more sale in the pipeline and you can end
| up with 15 year old products that are entirely the result of
| feature chasing.
|
| I think it is absolutely necessary for development to develop
| a better understanding of customers and their requirements.
| Is it possible for us to predict some of the features from
| customers 1..2.. or maybe 5 years down the line in a way that
| the architecture and design can easily accommodate? I think
| it is somewhat possible and there are many examples of
| flexible products that do just that.
| abakker wrote:
| As a user of software, I have to add that it is nicer to
| have the features, and I don't find myself worrying about
| what hacks went into making it. Most of the time.
|
| I know there are exceptions, but, usually I'd rather a
| company be customer focused and deliver a product I want,
| rather than worry too much about the methodology they use
| to deliver it.
| anaerobicover wrote:
| Sure, there's absolutely no reason for customers to know
| or case, but that's beside the point. It's going to be
| the developer's _job_ to modify or fix things in the
| future. You 're happy with the footbridge they built, but
| when sales comes back and says "okay new customer, now we
| need to be able to drive fully loaded Humvees across" you
| aren't the one tearing out the wooden posts and pouring
| concrete.
| goalieca wrote:
| How much enterprise software have you used over the years
| that has terrible quality? Vision and execution matter a
| lot in user experience and doubly so for security.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > There's always one more sale in the pipeline and you can
| end up with 15 year old products that are entirely the
| result of feature chasing.
|
| That sounds like a different way of saying "you can end up
| with 15 years off revenue".
| nostrebored wrote:
| The key here is that product is a buffer between sales and
| engineering. Sales teams should be a constant source of
| feedback for product teams who can spot the synergies
| you're talking about.
|
| SDMs should be a constant buffer between engineers and
| product.
|
| This works wonders at an enterprise or mid market company.
| I don't envy smaller companies that need to drive alignment
| between stakeholders that have to straddle all of these
| lines.
|
| A good portion of my job is helping small businesses find
| that alignment and being able to present the big picture to
| all of these teams. Somehow being external seems to help.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| SDM?
| vetinari wrote:
| From the context, "Sales Development Manager".
| g00gler wrote:
| I was thinking software development manager
| LootCrateDev wrote:
| Treating developers like loot crates is the surest way to
| turn your company into a shitshow.
|
| Feature chasing needs to have very coarse data attached to
| it:
|
| - how many overpromised features attracted revenue?
|
| - how many delivered overpromises features didn't win the
| potential customer?
|
| That last one is about 80% for my career.
| Centigonal wrote:
| What do you mean when you say, "treating developers like
| loot crates?"
|
| I understand your point that developer effort is valuable
| and should be directed toward features that have impact
| on the business and customers, but I don't see how that
| relates to the loot crate analogy.
|
| Is this about objectifying people? Is it about gambling
| related mechanics? I'm honestly very confused.
| lumost wrote:
| I'd also add that chasing clients tends to be a loosing
| game in the long term. The devs know this, but sales only
| sees an individual commission. In enterprise you get a
| lot of the following coming off the sales team.
|
| "We had a 5 minute phone call with someone doing a vendor
| comparison and saw that we didn't have features Y, and Z
| that X has. We got them to say they'd consider us if we
| delivered Y and gave them a 50% discount."
|
| The customer already decided on X, X isn't a direct
| competitor - if you build Y you'll just be a crappy
| version of X. Not to mention building Y means pushing out
| features that your target customers keep asking for.
|
| As a PM I got pulled into dozens of these calls as the
| sales team was desperate to hit quota. Not a single time
| did I see a feature that was worth building. The few
| times I saw a deal swing on these offers we had
| effectively guaranteed client specific dev work that
| other venders were turning down due to the risk of losing
| money.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Conversely, chasing clients is the only real way to find
| product market fit. You need money. There's no other way
| to get that money than to convince someone to pay for
| your product. Your product needs features and
| functionality to do that.
|
| I've been in many scenarios where devs have pushed back
| on table stakes functionality simply because we didn't
| have the data to prove that we need it. Even showing them
| a competitor and saying "we literally can't compete with
| XYZ" is often met with "yeah, but do we have the data to
| prove that?".
|
| Early on in a startup your roadmap is essentially gut
| feelings mixed with features your prospects are telling
| you they'd pay for. A lot of devs, designers and PdMs
| can't deal with this type of uncertainty. This is why I
| can't recommend contract devs enough. They're much more
| willing to just trust you and put the work in.
| lumost wrote:
| There's a fine line here between competitor focus and
| customer focus. If it's a table stakes functionality it
| should be trivial to describe the benefit the typical
| customer of your product gets from it (things like
| oauth/SSO, adjustable charts). If a competitor's product
| is resonating with customers and you think you should
| copy some of it - it pays to put in the work to describe
| the customer gap/what customers want the feature for.
|
| If you want to simply point at competitors and say "build
| that" then you need to set yourself up to be a second
| mover. Unfortunately this is a bit of a one way decision
| as you need to build the whole business around being
| cheaper. Bain capital had a whole notion of velocity
| sales based around this model which spawned a few
| companies.
| knowyourleadcom wrote:
| "we need to ship feature X by Y to get client Z otherwise the
| opportunity is gone."
|
| When you say client it becomes consulting that happens to
| have a software project at that point. If your market needs
| feature x Like a mobile app because a competitor is going to
| crush you without it then it makes sense. Reacting to a
| market every now and then is understandable. However I think
| the horrible sales driven companies react to individual
| customers and that destroys your chances of any cohesive plan
| as each sales person hijacks your devs...which means at that
| point they are selling your devs time for their individual
| gain hurting company's ability to make a large impact on the
| market. Shouldn't happen but that's sales driven.
| reader_mode wrote:
| I don't know - I've worked for a startup (in the size/age
| sense, not in the unicorn scaling sense) where they focused
| on one market segment (small customers) then got the
| opportunity to onboard a huge franchise. This required a
| huge change but would basically make their buisiness stable
| for X years and allow them to grow into a different market.
| But they had specific dates that needed to be met because
| existing provider contract was expiring, etc. etc.
|
| So the product wasn't built for their scale, it took a
| bunch of invasive changes, dirty hacks, and accepting
| client specific workflow initially. You can look at that
| and say "we're lockign ourselves into their workflow" and
| "we're making client specific features" - but this client
| literally 3x their revenue year one and increased it a
| couple times more for extra features developed. And once
| you have one big client and solve their problems - you can
| try to generalise and sell to their competition as well.
| LootCrateDev wrote:
| Devs aren't loot crates.
| simlevesque wrote:
| Could you please explain what you mean instead of
| repeating an empty catchphrase? And did you really create
| this account to say the same thing over and over ?
| LootCrateDev wrote:
| The HN community takes a grotesque pride in striving for
| imagined middle ground or pointless sophistry, so I'm
| here to take a singular position to counter that
| collective absurdity.
|
| Devs aren't loot crates.
|
| More info here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26854038
| nkozyra wrote:
| > When you say client it becomes consulting that happens to
| have a software project at that point.
|
| 100%. If you cannot qualify a feature being important for
| the product and most/all customers you're chasing dollars.
| It's a common trap, driven by commission structures that
| incentivize a sale over anything else.
| danjac wrote:
| These two examples do feel like strawmen, and are somewhat
| simplified. For example, "product-led" in this example lumps
| together PMs, designers and developers into a single group,
| whereas in fact there is conflict inherent in features vs user
| experience vs technical debt/constraints. Moreover even a
| sales-driven company is not going to promise a unique feature
| for every customer, unless they want to run out of money
| quickly or they are in the enterprise customer market with a
| small number of clients.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| It's useful for building the blogger's brand.
| jdauriemma wrote:
| Did anyone else immediately think of "The Conjoined Triangles of
| Success?"
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yeah, the chart gives off that vibe 100%:
| https://itamargilad.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Yin-Yang-...
| xbar wrote:
| "The beating heart of the company is its product teams, full of
| rockstar developers, designers and PMs, and rich in methodology
| and "culture". But these folks are compelled to follow the grand
| vision of management, which leads to convoluted product
| extravaganzas that don't blow anyone away."
|
| Garbage opinion piece.
| zerotolerance wrote:
| My experience with "sales-driven" is sales people selling things
| that don't exist, ill-defined, and delivery dates that are demand
| based. This leads to all corners cut, products that can only be
| sold once. In other words, sales-driven companies are a way to
| turn your company into a consultancy.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| nbzso wrote:
| One question? What we have to do when the market is not yet
| created? May be the author ignores the idea of iPhone? Can you
| imagine Jobs to be "market focused"? When there is no market for
| touch based phones? Market focused by the way perfectly describes
| Apple of today. The Irony is big.
| a4isms wrote:
| Most essays like this begin by pointing out that a company that
| over-focuses on X is headed for trouble, for almost any value of
| X. They then present Y, which if properly pursued, will solve the
| problem of X. Both sides of this argument are subject to "No True
| Scotsman" problems. By definition, over-focusing on X is going to
| be problematic, that's tautological. But what about companies
| that are giving X the right amount of focus?
|
| Likewise, of course if you're doing X badly and then you change
| to doing Y "right," things will get better. But how much of that
| is X vs Y, and how much is magically going from doing something
| wrong to doing something right?
|
| The essay pitches some education on how to do "market-focused"
| right. Fair enough, let's grant that in the hands of the well-
| intentioned, doing market-focused right will lead to success. Ok,
| but will taking a similar approach to fixing sales-focused also
| help? Is the assumption that sales-focused cannot be done right
| under any circumstances? I'm not sure the essay establishes this.
|
| Same for product-led growth ("PLG"), the current hotness in
| product management thanks in large part to Amazon's success. Ok,
| if PLG done wrong is bad, can we fix PLG and do it right?
|
| So my first observation is that the argument "Doing X badly is
| worse than doing Y correctly, so do Y correctly" neglects
| scenarios where we fix X. Is that an option as well?
|
| --
|
| My second observation is the dual of the above. What makes us
| think we can do Y correctly?
|
| Now don't get me wrong, I am not suggesting the author's
| educational offering is suspect. Come to your own conclusion
| about this, just like evaluating any vendor of a silver bullet.
|
| I'm suggesting something else: For those companies doing sales-
| led or product-led badly, what if the problem is the company and
| its leadership, not the methodology?
|
| In that case, you have to fix the company and its leadership, or
| they'll bring their problems with them to "market-led growth."
|
| I think of this second scenario often.
|
| Consider the time when companies were transitioning from shipping
| software on media to SaaS. Continuous integration and other
| practices transformed the very notion of "shipping," and solved
| many problems companies had with death marches to press golden
| masters.
|
| Shipping software on media was X, SaaS was Y. Many companies
| benefited greatly from the shift. But they were usually companies
| that were already doing reasonably well with shipping software on
| media.
|
| If a company was good at shipping software on media, switching to
| SaaS was a shock, but it removed the limitations imposed by
| physical media and distribution.
|
| But if a company had trouble shipping quality software to plan
| with physical media, it didn't magically become good at shipping
| quality software incrementally with SaaS. SaaS did not fix
| problems with engineering culture or leadership.
|
| --
|
| p.s. None of the above applies for much of HN's demographic: If
| you're starting from scratch, you don't have a "Doing X badly"
| problem to begin with. You can sit down and evaluate sales-led
| versus product-led versus market-focus purely on their individual
| merits. This is one of the great advantages of starting from
| scratch.
|
| But even if you don't have a "Doing X badly" problem, be careful
| with arguments that contrast "Doing X badly" with "Doing Y
| right." A balanced approach to choosing X versus Y would be to
| compare doing X right with doing Y right, and also to think about
| whether X or Y is going to be easier to do right for you in your
| situation.
| indymike wrote:
| How about option D:
|
| Balance. Sales, marketing, product (and the g&a team) are all
| crucial to success. The market, sales, and product all can be
| signals... But without balance the biggest opportunities and
| dangers will be missed.
| neom wrote:
| That's exactly right Indymike. Business should be vision and
| mission lead. If people have an understanding of the CHANGE
| they want to capture in the world (either by creating it or
| taking advantages of it), a good leadership will know when to
| pull on the levers inside the company of the business at the
| right time to complete a mission on a step towards the vision.
| Sometimes that's leaning into sales, sometimes it's leaning
| into product, sometimes it's leaning into technology, sometimes
| it's playing them all together. Business is more art than
| science, and the startup trope should be "I'm going to
| capitalize on change" not "I'm going to change the world".
| dasil003 wrote:
| This is not Sales vs Product. This is bad product management,
| full stop. It is not sales' responsibility to define the product,
| it is product's responsibility to do that, taking into account
| sales requests, market analysis, executive vision, user feedback
| and engineering feasibility. In any given situation it takes a
| lot of expertise and judgement (and often luck!) to know where
| they need to be focused. Trying to reduce actual product problems
| to some simple knob between caricatured role definitions will
| help no one except management consultants. In reality product
| management failure is very contextual to the problem at hand---
| details matter.
| qzw wrote:
| TLDR: find product/market fit.
| polote wrote:
| The beginning of the article is pretty on point. Most PM dream
| about working in a pure product-led company and spend their time
| complaining that it is not how things should be done. Which is a
| big misunderstanding of the PM job, I've written before how to
| navigate the PM in role in Saas enterprise (very likely sales
| driven) [1]
|
| Actually if you search the web for PM resources you will mostly
| find insights on how to run in a product-led environment. Which
| is funny because most of companies are not operating that way. It
| is even more funny because it is easier to fail a product-led
| company than a sales driven one
|
| The rest of the article is bullshit to enroll people for his
| workshops. There is no better gurus than ones who invent terms
| who don't exist and then spend their time explaining how genius
| it is. A market-focused seems to be the kind of companies that
| someone who has never run a company would imagine. Wins on all
| markets, but also on the product and the sales. And we all know
| that this is impossible
|
| [1] https://blog.luap.info/product-management-in-
| saas-b2b-enterp...
| [deleted]
| rushabh wrote:
| Both paths, sales or product (or market) can lead to success. The
| key is always execution.
| Closi wrote:
| I think the biggest issue with the "product-led" mindset is the
| one dimensionality of it.
|
| You need the right balance of everything in reality, including
| sales, and the mix is different for different companies.
| crsv wrote:
| The introduction of the idea of a "Market-focused" company is so
| trivial and unimaginative here that I can't think for a second
| anyone worth their salt as an operator would do much more than
| roll their eyes. This kind of content that creates these sort of
| false dichotomies that capture some bad aspects of poor business
| strategy and then present some idea where you correct these
| wrongs as novel is just so... brutally uninteresting. The fact
| that this stuff floats to the top of HN as become as unsurprising
| as it is disappointing. Some "bad thing bad" title that people
| don't even bother reading gets pumped up, and then when you take
| a moment to dig in and digest the content, it's a whole bunch of
| nothin'.
| achow wrote:
| Surprised that this post is at no.1!
|
| The content does not have much depth and seems to be a build up
| for a silver bullet solution (author's workshop).
|
| _In my Lean Product Management workshops you'll learn how to
| develop product strategy, research your market, set goas,
| prioritize ideas..._
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Sadly the front page is subjected to manual steering from HN
| mods. This is most likely how we get submissions like this to
| be successful here.
|
| https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html
| detaro wrote:
| The suggestion that this is a post the mods would positively
| influence is fairly ridiculous.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| If you read carefully, you'll see my comment says: "posts
| like this" instead of "this post".
| alisonkisk wrote:
| If "like" means "this statement means nothing" then it's
| best not to write the statement at all.
| someguydave wrote:
| I suspect this post was promoted via a voting ring.
| [deleted]
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| There is not a single general purpose recipe to do business.
|
| My advice would be to understand and focus on your strengths, and
| to avoid cargo-cults.
|
| And yes, alignment in any company or team is extremely important,
| this is what leadership is for.
| dmak wrote:
| I skimmed the article, but I would argue product focused has to
| understand everything including being "market-focused". You need
| to understand what the market is asking to guide your product
| decisions.
| hacknews20 wrote:
| Just be customer led. Stop making it blah.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Related to this article, I work at Shopify and they have 3 rules
| which are loosely as follows:
|
| 1) Build a great product
|
| 2) Make money
|
| 3) 1 always comes before 2
| dnndev wrote:
| Most companies have a list like this and other values they
| claim but rarely follow.
|
| In all large companies at one point the stars aligned and you
| had smart, connected devs and sales people that made a great
| product, executed and sold. This fades after a while, you get
| academics and newbies that derail and complicated a good thing.
|
| I have seen it over and over again. Hulu is a good example,
| started out very strong and slowly became a terrible product.
| Til this I dont understand the UI.
| arkitaip wrote:
| I can't think of a single company that would advocate anything
| else and yet all of them prioritize money over product, even if
| it means enacting petty user-hostile policies.
| marcinzm wrote:
| When you're large enough growth slows down so you make more
| money by building a moat and squeezing your customers. When
| you're still growing quickly a good product and the resulting
| growth leads to more revenue.
| weeboid wrote:
| Ahh, you are mistaking Great Product(tm) (performs in the
| market) for great product (genuinely moves humanity forward)
| golemotron wrote:
| Leader-Led is better and it solves both problems.
| sophrocyne wrote:
| If this is your definition of "product-led", you have a bad
| Product team.
|
| The Product teams job is to make sure that you aren't relying on
| the "if you build it they will come" approach to product
| development.
|
| One of the only real arguments against product-led, as I see it,
| is when the quality of the product is less correlated with
| success (e.g., low competition markets with long contracts), and
| I'd still argue against it. Who wants to build a business
| strategy around products that don't fit a market need?
|
| Yes, Product needs to work with Sales and Marketing to determine
| whether something is valuable to the customer and viable for the
| business. No, Sales teams are not the best decision-maker for
| "what should we build next".
|
| Before reading his bio, I'd have thought the author had only a
| cursory understanding of real product management. Given his
| background, I'm more inclined to believe this is click-bait.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| How would you define product-led? Or can you link to some
| examples? Thank you!
| kyriee wrote:
| Product-led typically means "driven by customer needs" but
| also being able to make the correct trade-offs vis a vis
| engineering and sales considerations. That is, delivering
| something that is in line with what you can build and not
| delivering "value" that the customer is not ready to pay for.
|
| Which can be opposed to "sales driven" where the sales team
| sold something, engineering has to play catch up, which can
| lead to technical debt and lack of focus mid-term.
|
| Or engineering led, where the engineering team will decide
| priorities and might push cool tech demos that will never
| become successful products. Google being the best example of
| this type of culture.
|
| Edit: article is terrible. He creates strawmans to sell his
| wares. As always, beware of consultant blogs.
| Closi wrote:
| You are describing customer-led IMO.
|
| Product led is about building the best product, with the
| "best" taking into account customer wants.
|
| But product is just one dimension of customer needs, and
| customer needs are fulfilled across all other departments
| either directly or indirectly. A sales-led company can
| still be driven by customer needs, so the definition is way
| too broad.
|
| Also the statement that "product led" means "making the
| correct trade off between sales/engineering" is too broad.
| You could just as easily say "sales/engineering led" means
| "having the correct mix of product".
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm not @kyriee but I agree with them.
|
| There's no such thing as "customer-led". That's not a
| common term, or when it's used it's used so generically
| as to mean pretty much everything.
|
| "Product led" describes _specifically_ what a "product
| manager" is hired to do -- make trade-offs primarily
| between engineering and sales (as well as take into
| consideration management priorities and general user
| satisfaction, but user satisfaction is only one priority
| out of many -- and often not the top one, either).
|
| And if "sales-led" or "engineering-led" resulted in
| business success then product managers wouldn't exist,
| because they wouldn't be needed. But sales and
| engineering often have very conflicting priorities, and
| would result in drastically different products if left to
| their own devices.
|
| Hence, product-led.
| Closi wrote:
| Meeting customer needs across the value chain is how all
| companies make money, so calling that 'product-led' seems
| pointless to me.
|
| > If sales-led or engineering-led resulted in business
| success then product managers wouldn't exist
|
| By this same logic, I should find that sales managers and
| engineering managers don't exist in a world where
| 'product-led' leads to business success.
|
| But of course they do, because everyone adds or creates
| value and contributes to business success.
| kyriee wrote:
| I'm in agreement with pretty much everything @crazygringo
| has said.
|
| I don't know if this will help, but if I can offer a
| clarification on why I think product-led id not
| synonymous to "customer-led" or "market led" is that it's
| not simply finding and responding to market demands.
|
| You have different types of product managers (f. ex. I am
| kind of excluding "technical product managers" from this
| characterization), but typically, product needs to own
| and understand what customers want BUT be able to
| understand the tradeoffs, factor in what delivering that
| value actually entails* AND assess the opportunity cost
| of pursuing these features vs 1 000 000 possible ideas.
|
| This is typically not the job of sales managers,
| engineering managers or marketing managers, etc. So
| product is the function that uses market demands + input
| from all these other managers, gets buy-in and then helps
| things go smoothly.
|
| * Building a feature is only part of the cost of a
| feature. It has to be marketed, it has to be maintained,
| it has to be improved, etc.
| crazygringo wrote:
| You don't seem to be understanding what I'm saying at
| all. Let me try again.
|
| Sales managers specifically focus on sales, they manage
| internally and have people underneath them. Similarly,
| engineering managers focus on engineering, manage
| internally and have people underneath them.
|
| Product managers don't have people underneath them, they
| don't have reports (except for other product managers).
| It's a fundamentally different position that is
| explicitly cross-departmental.
|
| And the idea of product managers existing without
| sales/engineering managers is nonsensical. Who would they
| talk to in those departments then?
|
| Of course everybody tries to add value. But the point
| here is that product management is the _only_ position
| that is _explicitly_ cross-departmental, _precisely_ to
| prevent departments from making decisions that seem to
| make sense internally but don 't for the company as a
| whole.
|
| Because experience shows that, without product managers,
| departments often _do_ make decisions that make sense for
| the department but _don 't_ for the business as a whole.
|
| At very small companies, the founder/CEO is often the de-
| facto product manager, but once you reach a certain scale
| you need to hire product managers to handle all the
| lateral communications and decisions, while the CEO
| focuses on things at the top.
|
| Does that makes sense now?
| ignoramous wrote:
| Freshworks is a product-led company, and its co-founder spoke
| about it at length at a conference, which has since been
| turned into a blog post: https://archive.is/267gb (origin
| link is MIA: https://saasboomi.com/how-startups-can-use-
| product-led-growt... )
|
| Some key points:
|
| - Product led growth makes it easier to launch a start-up.
| Global market, nice product features, some word-of-mouth
| publicity. That's all it takes to launch a product led SaaS
| business.
|
| - Product led growth is not just a go to market strategy,
| it's a complete business growth strategy. Product led
| everything, from product management and design to marketing
| and sales.
|
| - The products must be built for the end users... Even if you
| are targeting a business, you need to remember that it is an
| individual who is going to use that product. And it is for
| these actual users for whom the product must be designed.
|
| - When it comes to corporate buy vs team buy, team buy is
| much quicker and frictionless. Having a product that can be
| purchased by a team on their own is the best for product led
| growth. The scaling can come later when you have multiple
| teams within the same organization using your product.
|
| - Each sale is a small ticket sale but this also enables
| people managing just a small or large team to decide whether
| they want to buy your product. As this decision is based on
| experienced value and not some perceived value promised by a
| sales guy, the success probability is really high.
|
| - There are two things that product design teams need to ask
| themselves. One, can the user start with the product without
| any training or help video? If the answer to this one is yes,
| you are in a good place... Two, do I need to send the user
| outside the product for any information? If the answer to
| this one is yes, you are in trouble.
|
| - The product led marketing has to happen inside the product,
| once the customer has signed up. Each and every aspect of the
| business must be thought out according to the user journey.
|
| Disadvantages:
|
| - On the face of it, product led growth sounds so doable that
| most startups begin with a very grand vision of what they
| wish to achieve. Whereas in reality, they need to start small
| and gradually step up to reach their grand vision.
|
| - Churn is the biggest problem in product led growth. Churn
| rate is a good metric to judge how good your product
| execution is.
|
| - Another disadvantage of product led growth strategy is that
| product execution must be stellar. If product experience is
| not great, users will move elsewhere.
|
| Pivoting to Sales-led:
|
| - Product led growth is capital efficient. It is very easy to
| go from 0 to 100 million in ARR. But beyond that sales led
| growth is more effective because the brand is set and it is
| easier to move to enterprise level.
|
| - Once you have used the product led growth to find that
| wedge into the enterprises, you can consider sales led
| growth. The point to remember here is that demands on the
| product team increases dramatically once you pivot to sales
| led growth. You are no linger thinking of single workflows or
| single teams. Your focus must shift enterprise wide and there
| can be no compromise on API coverage, customization or
| integration.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I'd like to read that blog post, but your link 404s.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Thanks. Edited the post to link to archive:
| https://archive.is/267gb
| lmeyerov wrote:
| We are going through this right now.
|
| Product-led is where users drive the full funnel of
| marketing, sales, and hopefully, product + engineering.
| Consider GitHub:
|
| Marketing: You get invited to collab on a github repo and
| make an account. People share links to OSS repos you depend
| on. You see a Add CI/CD/Actions button on the PR review page
| and eventually click it.
|
| Sales: You need to make a private repo, and convert from
| freemium. Your company grows, and so does your seat count.
| You hire a CISO, and they demand upgrading for SSO. You get a
| phone call that you added SSO but not scans. You get an email
| that they ran a scan, and here are the first 3 Caves on one
| of the 3 languages you use, and would you like a consultation
| on that + price optimization?
|
| Product: Your actions are recorded by analytics for
| everything, your google searches mined, and basically you
| live under a digital microscope for where dropoffs and slow
| growth are around inbound, usage, conversion, internal
| growth, and churn. Pricing scales with value/use.
|
| Engineering: Feature requests are tied to teams analyzing the
| above, both internal and external. Things like observability
| and fast deploys matter more as teams are explicitly
| interested in experimenting with users.
|
| Product-led doesn't mandate other orgs go away nor freemium,
| but does emphasize flywheels around self-serve and usage
| patterns / funnels, which rethinks a lot. It requires heavy
| product market fit (and helps get there). For something like
| big b2b, that is super hard, but if you hit it, sales flips
| from slow, expensive, and oppositional top-down to more of a
| lead-rich, warm, and even automatic flow, which is amazing.
|
| The original article showed a misleading view of product-led
| by doing a bad strawman, or maybe from pre-use/fit that's not
| tied to customers ("if you build it, they will come" is not
| product led). Product-led is generally slow (ex: SaaS) and
| hard to get fit, which is a tough spot and IMO why VC funding
| needs to be of a limited and patient sort for early stage.
| ("You're spending too much and need to do layoffs to get time
| to get to better fit" said no VC ever.) The article _does_
| make a good point that value-driven leaps are tough, and
| doing 0-1 stuff requires different work than 1-n, and
| especially when product-driven.
| metafunctor wrote:
| Are you not invoking a classic no true Scotsman argument, "a
| true product team always leads to success"?
|
| I think a more interesting view might be to understand
| boundaries between product, sales, marketing, customer
| development, business strategy, support, operations, etc. Those
| boundaries may be where the problem is at.
| sophrocyne wrote:
| Moreso, I'm trying to emphasize that the Product teams job is
| to know what factors go into effective prioritization
| decisions, and work across the boundaries you just mentioned.
|
| They are an integration function for decisions about value
| generation activities (I.e., product development) and should
| be spending the majority of their time working with customers
| and across the business to make sure they're guiding the
| business towards the right decisions.
|
| There are a lot of Project Management jobs that masquerade as
| Product.
| polote wrote:
| > One of the only real arguments against product-led, as I see
| it, is when the quality of the product is less correlated with
| success
|
| In B2B enterprise the quality of the product is not correlated
| with success at all. Almost only the sales strategy and go to
| market execution counts. If you think this is not the case,
| join any B2B enterprise company and you will see it in action.
| That doesn't mean the product has to be shit.
|
| > Who wants to build a business strategy around products that
| don't fit a market need?
|
| There is a difference between fitting the market need and being
| product-led. Customers don't only buy a product, they buy a
| vision, they buy an execution, they buy a service. There are
| tons of domains (if not most) that don't need a good product
| but only a ok product.
|
| Product-led is a go to market strategy when a company is
| growing. There are almost no established big companies in the
| world which are still product-led
| spamizbad wrote:
| Yeah, I feel like the product side of enterprise software
| involves lots of box-ticking features for someone with
| purchasing authority. The rest is driven by timing, sales,
| and support contracts.
| sophrocyne wrote:
| Enterprise B2B is my go-to example of when product quality is
| not correlated with success. Distribution and getting through
| procurement processes is much more important.
|
| As to your other points, Product-led matters when good
| products matter. Some products are bought purely for the
| brand/identity element (Seth Godin writes a lot on this), and
| product is irrelevant in those markets. Imagine there are a
| number of cases where product quality is irrelevant, but that
| goes back to my earlier point of the "only argument against
| product led"
| polote wrote:
| yeah but you usually don't choose between product led or
| sales driven. The founder creates a company, a culture is
| created around and this culture will stay more or less the
| same throughout the live of the company, so you don't
| choose to be product led, nor can't you advise it. It is
| just there or not
| cbsmith wrote:
| Similar to the "sales-driven" definition being derived from bad
| Sales teams. ;-)
| RocketSyntax wrote:
| Product is already market-focused. As a career product manager
| that has also worked as a software engineer and a salesman - I
| find your article offensive and polarizing.
| k__ wrote:
| The problem I saw most of the time was devs simply see value
| differently or ignore it completely.
|
| In the best case they think about solving a user problem as
| directly as possible.
|
| I the worst case they just want to apply a technology or paradigm
| as correctly as possible, and everyone has their own opinion on
| how this is done.
|
| But successful software is a non-trivial function of solving a
| users problem and extracting the most money with that solution
| from the market.
|
| That and privacy, security, performance, usability, etc. pp.
|
| Nobody cares how your solution is a perfect application for K8s.
|
| If they can't find it because of non-existing marketing, it won't
| work.
|
| If you can't make money to support it's maintenance, it won't
| work.
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| tl;dr: be a Consumer-Driven company.
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