Hacks to reaching PMF from our heroes
We spoke to three experts for this issue and asked: to give us non-obvious pieces of advice that founders can carry into 2023.
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Learning from the past
It is that time of the year again when things slow down, people pause to reflect, recover and rejuvenate from the journey that was. It was a path that had great highs and deep lows but we soldiered on. We tried to find answers to questions that looked unimaginable not too long ago and we kept chipping away at challenges in search of solutions. It was exhausting and satisfying at the same time. So we decided to make life easier for our founders.
This is a special edition to consume over the holiday week. We spoke to more than 14 experts throughout the year but we’ve picked three leaders and asked them: to give us two non-obvious pieces of advice that founders can take into 2023.
We spoke to:
Satyajeet Salgar, director of product management, YouTube Shopping, on the building blocks to PMF
Parimal Bajpayee, vice president, engineering, InMobi, on building successful engineering teams
Rushabh Mehta, founder and CEO, Frappe
Optimize learning if you have product-market-fit
Satyajeet says that founders and their teams need to be open to accepting negative feedback from customers or recognizing the mediocre adoption of their product.
One of the reasons this happens is because “the true user need is often not what you had initially predicted and the first version of the product is almost never the perfect answer for that user need even when you get it right,” he says.
It requires a lot of iteration and experimentation even before the first version of a product is broadly available. If founding teams keep this mindset, i.e. the goal isn’t to launch an MVP but to optimize for learning and getting to PMF, then the ups and downs of building a product and a product team become a lot easier.
Spend time making sure you will know your metrics
“Many teams I work with (even experienced ones) will often de-prioritize logging and having a dashboard in place before they launch,” he says. Quite understandably, in the excitement of getting their product to customers this falls off the list.
However, this makes it hard for them to know how their customers are actually using the product vs. what they expected.
ICYMI: Satyajeet was the guest on our very popular product newsletter.
Build engineering for success
Parimal has a very defined way of building teams. He advocates that engineering should not be put into pigeonholes. “Often people believe that engineering teams should be given immediate goals and product managers should be able to go further out,” he says but this is easier said than done. There needs to be a defined way to make this play out.
A capable value chain has
A stack of 50-100 engineers
A team of eight to 10 product managers
About five to 10 folks from senior leadership in the value chain.
In a Series A company, senior leadership includes the CEO or the business unit SVP, product GMs and various VPs.
ICYMI: Parimal was on a very interesting newsletter on engineering vs business.
Open source’s time is coming
Rushabh believes open source will be how the future operates.
“Open source as a distribution model will keep growing and more funding will be made available for developers to make and share code,” he says. However, whether this will end up with more revenues for the companies is still to be seen.
“There is bound to be a correction on the funding part, but open source as a way of life is here to stay and everything that is interesting in software is happening in this space,” he insists.
ICYMI: Rushbah was a guest on our very engaging newsletter on open source in February.
What Together’s been up to
Finding your right strategy: Earlier this month, we invited Henry Schuck, founder and CEO, Zoominfo for a fireside chat with Manav. They discussed GTM strategy and the insights from Henry’s journey that founders could use to gain an edge in the early days of starting up.
And that’s that for this year folks. Thank you for reading and sticking with us. If you believe we need to do something better, please let us know in the comments. We’ll see you in January. Happy new year to you and yours from all of us at Together.