Balancing Big Thinking and Fast Execution in B2B Product Management
Counterintuitive? Yes, Possible?, Hell Yeah!
For a product manager in an early-stage startup, balancing the need to think big with the urgency of moving fast can be challenging. On the one hand, having a long-term vision and thinking about how the product can scale and evolve over time is important. On the other hand, in the early stages, there may be limited resources and a need to move quickly to validate assumptions and iterate on the product.
This is particularly difficult when working on B2B products, as there are many organizational challenges and specific nuances on building these types of products, as I covered in my previous article. In this post, I’ll cover some concepts that helped me move fast in such environments while maintaining a solid product vision and strategy.
First, Understand the problem: Working Backwards
I won’t spend too much time covering this part as there are many other articles that have done a good job of doing so like this one or this one and even a book.
The general principle is that you start with the customer and then work on a solution, finding the real problem and jobs to be done can be time-consuming but ultimately helps us save time further in the development process, and as good product managers, we need to make sure we are building the right thing.
The methodology proposes that we answer 5 questions about the customer and the experience we want to provide:
Who is the customer?
What is the customer's problem or opportunity?
What is the most important customer benefit?
How do you know what customers want?
What does the customer experience look like?
When we move down the list, the questions turn to be more specific about the benefits of the solution and how this will look like, we want to avoid that for now and focus on the first two as we want to have a good understanding of who we are designing for and what their problem is.
Thinking Big: Airbnb’s 11-stars
If you’ve read my previous article about frameworks, you know by now that I’m not a big fan of highly structured frameworks or recipes, but I recently came across 11-stars by reading this article from Reid Hoffman and was blown away by the principles behind it, so I’ll spend some time here as there are a couple of ideas from the article that also resonated with me.
The general principle of this framework is to isolate one part of the product (feature, flow, etc.) and think about how a 5-star rating experience would look like for your customer, and then start thinking about 6-star, 7-star, and all the way to 11-stars.
Here’s where the magic happens, what this framework is doing is forcing you to think about crazy ideas but there might be a sweet spot between 5-stars and 11-stars where you can find feasible interventions to your product that will delight your customers, quoting the article “Create a magical experience… and then figure out what part of that magical thing can scale”.
I can’t stress enough the importance of doing similar exercises when working on B2B products, especially for companies that want to implement a Product Led Growth Strategy (PLG), there are always excuses like “our customer is not tech-savvy”, “they won’t understand it” or “that’s not possible”.
Bridging the gap: From customer’s problems to 11-star experiences
According to Reid Hoffman’s article, the idea is to identify which parts of the experience could be built and tested and then figure out how to scale them, this is the widely known “Build things that don’t scale”, which I agree with based on my experience. This is a concept used lightly to build and forget scrappy products. Building things that do not scale is 10000% fine, but letting experiments or proof of concepts stay without doing an evaluation is problematic in the mid-term (tech debt, operational costs, etc.) if it’s not used wisely and as part of a bigger vision. As with every experiment, it must have a hypothesis behind it, a way to measure it, and also a timeframe to make a decision to promote it as a permanent feature of your product, this is the difference between ‘spraying and praying’ and real experimentation.
In my experience scaling processes and tools, sometimes we think about it as black or white it’s either done manually and with heavy human interaction or fully automated, and I think this type of thinking has spread out with the popularity of PLG and case studies of companies that got to a point where the majority of their sales and activation process is done by the product. What these case studies are missing out on is the intermediate steps and journey between the current experience and their 11-star fully automated experience.
My take on this topic is that sometimes it’s more beneficial to become Product Assisted before heavily investing in Product Led strategies, this rationale applies to products that have long sales cycles or where the activation is a painful and long process. Does this mean they’ll never be product-led? ABSOLUTELY NO they can, it’ll just take longer but with the right experimentation approach, you can reap benefits even faster and from day one.
Here I provide some guidelines for where and how we could experiment with a Product Assisted approach:
Lead qualification and scoring.
Self-prescription: helping the customer pick the right plan before a sales call. By providing the right information or tools, you can keep the lead warm while your Sales Team makes the time to contact them.
User activation: By using the product to guide the user through the easier steps, you can keep the user engaged and free up some time from your Customer Success or Sales team and use their time in high-leverage parts of the process.
Customer support: Identify the most common issues and provide an easy way to find the solution before talking to a human e.g Help center, chatbot, tooltips, alerts, and in-product messaging.
Key takeaways
Here are the four key takeaways from the article:
Understand the problem: Working Backwards: Start with the customer and work on a solution by finding the real problem and jobs to be done. Answer five questions about the customer and the experience you want to provide.
Airbnb’s 11-stars: Think Big: Use the 11-stars framework to isolate one part of the product and think about how a 5-star rating experience would look like for your customer, then start thinking about 6-star, 7-star, and all the way to 11-stars.
Bridging the gap: From customer’s problems to 11-star experiences: Identify which parts of the experience could be built and tested and then figure out how to scale them. Sometimes it’s more beneficial to become Product Assisted before heavily investing in Product Led strategies.
Real experimentation and evaluation: Every experiment must have a hypothesis behind it, a way to measure it, and also a timeframe to make a decision to promote it to a permanent feature of your product. This is the difference between ‘spraying and praying’ and real experimentation.
Thank you for reading! I hope the information was useful and applicable. If you need help with topics related to this article, hit me up for a free consultation call. Let's talk about how we can team up and tackle these challenges together!