Sophie Martin

Check out this interview with one of the most well-rounded and smartest PMs I know. Then consider hiring him for a consulting project 😉

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a note on intuition and building products (via mike knoop, founder - zapier, go follow him on twttr) -- Wisdom for founding teams is "talk to users". Over the last 10 years this has become the playbook for doing 0 to 1 work. As the advice became dogma, some founders forgot why it exists, and a new failure mode emerged: "the blind walk to product-market fit". YC popularized "talk to users" in response to the classic mistake of coming up with some idea in isolation, building in secret for months or years, and launching just to learn no one cares. Talking to users forces faster contact with reality. Your initial idea and and intuition are likely wrong in material ways, so you want to shrink the time to learn this. At Zapier, I tell teams to try and model this behavior: ship in the AM, demo to users in the PM. If you do this, you get 5-7 hits on reality per week compared to a team on a 2-week release process (or worse). This all makes sense and many founders conclude their idea, intuition, or experience don't really matter. They model finding pmf as y=mx+b where cycle time is "m" and the initial idea is "b". In this model, founder intuition gives them an initial head start but impact is quickly overtaken by iteration speed. This leads them to heavily discount or even outright ignore their own experience and intuition -- many get stuck doing a fast cycle, but ultimately directionless, traversal through the pmf maze. The modeling mistake here is the "m" term is decomposed into (iteration speed) * (intuition). Every time you make contact with reality, you learn something new. And you get to decide what to do with that new information. Should you ignore it? Update but carry on? Change directions entirely? This is why intuition is important. Your idea and experience do not just establish initial position on the Y-axis. They are a multiplier on every decision or change you make. The faster your iteration speed, the more overall impact your experience can have. If you're ideas are right, they are right faster. If they are wrong, they are wrong more obviously. All other things equal, founders with experience in a domain outperform blank-slate founders doing the blind walk.

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Really enjoyed my chat with Matt Hinds, CEO of Sauce, where we talked about transforming product vision into company strategy, partnering with CEOs, and protecting teams against planning busy work that gets thrown away in Q1. As we head into company planning season, here’s the tl;dr on how to get planning right: 📝 Define the strategy — Create a 1-pager (ok, maybe a 2-pager) that includes: the mission, what that means for customers in 3 years time, and investment areas for the next 12-18 months. 👥 Design the org — Spend a lot of time on org design so your teams reflect that strategy. 🎯 Clarify the investment areas — What’s even more important than what you’re investing in, is what you’re not investing in. Make sure your teams know what to focus on and what falls away. 🔨 Empower teams — Let the what’s and how’s come from the team. As a leader, it’s not up to you to dictate what we need to build. You need to empower your teams to decide that based on their in depth understanding of your customers and business. Curious to know what others biggest learnings have been when it comes to planning? Drop me a comment below and let's compare notes 👇 #product #startups #productmanagement

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💡 The Sean Ellis test is a simple yet effective method to gauge product market fit. Just ask your users, "How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?" and if 40% or more respond "very disappointed," then you have a leading indicator that you achieved product market fit. Sean Ellis highlights on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast that you can further ask your users why they feel this way to understand what resonates with them the most. In the past, I've run this test at the end of the product journey, however, some companies like Nubank go one step further and optimize for product-market fit down to the feature level. #ProductManagement #ProductDiscovery

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Thinking about how to structure your team for a multi-product launch effort? Our multi-product pros Ershad Jamil and Harpreet Ahluwalia suggest having an end-to-end GM. Coordination costs kill speed (and speed is one of the best ways a startup can win). While a slowdown is inevitable when you go multi-product, one way to eliminate some of those costs is to have a central GM responsible for all aspects of new products. More insights from our recent VSaaS Collective session on going multi-product can be found here: https://lnkd.in/gzaYg2fX

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