Building a Product Team
A Reflection on Product Teams & Lessons Looking Forward
Prelude
One of the hardest things about building a startup is building a product team. Upon raising hundreds of thousands of Ringgit, startups especially in Malaysia find it hard to find product-market fit. This is essentially caused by underestimating the importance of skillsets required in product team, as well as greatly overestimating the ability to execute Lean Startup techniques. In this week’s writing, I wanted to share an epiphany I had while deciding the direction of my company. I’d first like to define the term “Product Team” as;
A cross-discipline team of people with skills in marketing, engineering, sales and design. The purpose of the team is to create a product that people will use and/or pay for.
Take my observations with a grain of salt and proceed with caution.
The 3 Levels of Product Teams
The creation of a product team doesn’t happen overnight. It is often a multi step process taking years to perfect. Based on what I’ve seen, it happens in 3 levels.
Level 0 — The Ideas Product Team
You wake up one day with an idea that you think can change the world. You anoint yourself as “Founder and CEO” and ask 10 of your closest friends and family on whether they will buy your product. Eight of them say yes, and you embark on a journey with your pitch deck claiming 80% market validation success looking for funds. You should read this;
Also, at this stage you’re not a product team yet, your ‘idea’ doesn’t carry any weight. Hence, Level 0. Moving on.
Level 1— The Feature Capable Product Team
A feature capable product team is essentially a team, which at a minimum, has engineering talent sufficient to build features required for your business model to run. Now, this is different across different different businesses. If you’re an e-commerce company, being able to deploy a Wordpress site with WooCommerce may qualify you as a feature capable team. If you are an AI company, then your feature capable team must have AI engineers who can deliver your minimum viable product.
I believe, a feature capable team should strive to optimize for speed of development, without compromising stability in order to reach the next level. In order to achieve this, it is crucial to adopt communication frameworks and engineering practices that is suitable for your team. For example, at RedSquare, we have focused on early stage product MVPs, so we attempted to create a framework called RUX (RedSquare UX) Sprint to accelerate development for our clients.
More on RUX in the coming months. Once you have optimized for speed, it is time to move to the next level.
Level 2— The Growth Optimized Product Team
Every successful startup founder will attest that product features alone do not generate sales. Most of the time, if you build it, they won’t come. Although the term “growth hacking” is often thrown out a lot, many don’t realise that “growth hacking” techniques need to be baked into the product seamlessly. The term is often reduced to the activity of writing blog posts for your product.
To achieve this team, you need, at a minimum, a data guy and a kickass engineering team.
During my internship at Supahands, I was able to work on an onboarding system for new user which increased growth by a significant amount(forgot the real numbers). However it took me a month to implement, but the company had a senior team to which was able to rapidly prototype other, more important features.
So the lesson here is, to achieve level 2, you must be able to rapidly build features, so it is realistic for you to invest in growth hacking.
Another thing to be concerned about is the ability of your current features to be growth hacked. Dropbox is a good example of this. They built a growth hack which grants users 1GB of additional free storage for everyone they invited into the service. Now, on the surface this may look like an easy thing to do, but consider the following;
1) The storage and retrieval functionality of the main product needs to be efficient so that it can be cheap to execute this hack.
2) The on-boarding process needs to be capable of detecting illegitimate claims of free storage.
3) The amount of storage given free needs to be calculate to the point where it is worth while to give away, corresponding to the total number of new users invited.
And I’m sure there are many more issues they had to deal with.
Once they have a team that can build for growth, they finally reach the last stage.
Level 3 — The Behaviour Inducing Product Team
This is the holy grail of product development. To have a product that is not only used for its purpose, but a product that uses its user to perform certain profitable behaviour. This is the realm of your Facebooks, your Amazons.
To achieve this level, you need users. A tonne of users. Millions even Billions of users. That is why you need a growth optimised team first.
The Behaviour Inducing Product Team is able to run experiments, micro-experiments and Split test them with the might of thousands of product team members. Most of them, religiously study Nir Eyal’s Hooked, with the goal of making you stare at the screen more, buy more and use more. Everything from the shade of blue used in the Facebook navigation bar, to the little animation the heart button plays on Twitter, is meticulously calculated to not only work on thousands of different devices, but also millions of people spanning thousands of cultures, languages and upbringings. To produce that sudden jolt of endorphin, to make you feel rewarded as the user takes actions that profit the company.
The absolute minimum team for this is a world class engineering team, world class psychologists and world class designers.
Conclusion
In a place like Malaysia, where the talent is rare and hard to find, it is more important than ever to be realistic of our expectations of what you can produce as a startup.
So that’s my observation so far. Let’s see if this hold true as I myself, learn how to build a product team. If you loved this post give me claps, and if you disagree, let me know in the comments below.
Cheers!
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