How your past experience can hurt your startup
As a founder, your past experience will likely influence your preferences toward a specific discipline. For instance, if you have an engineering background, you might prioritize the technical aspects and how the product is built. On the other hand, if you have worked in sales or marketing, you might focus more on acquiring customers.
I've observed that first-time founders often view startups as having two main disciplines: business and technology. They believe that having someone skilled in sales and marketing to sell the product, and someone proficient in technology to build it, is sufficient. This perception is not entirely incorrect, as these two disciplines are crucial for building a technology startup.
However, when founding a startup, it's not as simple as taking two professionals who excel in engineering and business and having them continue their respective roles. The role of a founder extends beyond their previous well-defined jobs. It requires them to shift their focus from solely considering "how" to build a great product or "how" to acquire customers. Founders now bear the additional responsibility of determining "what" product to build and, more importantly, "why" it should be built.
Product Management as a core competency
In established software companies, Product Management sits in the middle of the three core disciplines of Tech, Business, and UX.
By definition, Product Managers must build an appreciation and understanding of each discipline and become experts at weighing and managing trade-offs between them.
Good Product Managers tend to leave the implementation details (or the “how”) to the function-area experts on their team while doubling down on figuring out the product strategy and vision (or the ”what” and “why”) of the product.
I was fortunate enough to work as a Product Manager before starting my startup, Prodsight, and it greatly impacted how I approached building my product and the outcomes.
While I don’t think you need to have a Product Manager as one of the co-founders, bringing a Product mindset to your company and how you approach building your first product could be transformational.
Over-indexing on Business
A common mistake business-oriented founders make is selling something that doesn’t exist. They would meet a prospective client and tell them what they want to hear by inventing features or entire products to close a deal.
Then they would return to their team and say, “We need to build this by the end of Q2 for the new client I just signed. Can we do it?”.
This is an extreme example but something I have seen in real life at various levels of severity.
Outside of the blatant disrespect to the engineering counterparts, the critical problem here is making up your product vision on the fly without considering the other two core disciplines of Tech and UX.
The act of soliciting business before the product is built is good as long as it’s done for research and validation purposes. Knowing what people will or will not buy can be a strong signal informing your product vision.
Unlike professional services, software products can be notoriously difficult to change. Once a team builds something, it’s literally etched in code and will likely stay there for many years. The sunk cost bias will make it very difficult to remove the feature, and now that one client commitment is driving your product.
Continuing this mindset creates a “feature-factory” culture where engineers become order-takers and simply churn out feature after feature without much overarching product strategy or vision. Talented engineers rarely want to work in such companies for long, which can become a problem in attracting and retaining talent.
Over-indexing on Tech
Founders with a strong technology leaning may possess exceptional technical skills and knowledge, but they are not exempt from falling into common startup traps. One of the most prevalent and detrimental traps is the act of building something that nobody wants.
Engineers, by nature, have a deep affinity for technology. Their passion and expertise lie in solving complex problems using their technical skills. Consequently, when engineers become startup founders, they often find themselves naturally drawn toward the "solution space." They focus on the technological aspects of their product or service, dedicating their efforts to creating innovative solutions.
In a typical engineering role, professionals work for someone else, and Product Managers make decisions regarding what to build. Their primary responsibility is to work with the technology assigned to them and ensure its effective implementation. However, when engineers embark on building their own startup, their perspective shifts significantly. Suddenly, every feature, every line of code, and every hour spent coding becomes an investment with potential consequences.
The decision to build a specific feature comes with an opportunity cost attached. By choosing to develop one feature, founders sacrifice the chance to work on another feature or task that might be more valuable or aligned with customer needs.
As founders with a strong technology leaning, balancing the product's technological aspects and market demand are crucial. While it is tempting to immerse oneself in the intricacies of technology, successful founders recognize the importance of understanding customer needs, market trends, and the overall business landscape.
Avoiding the trap of building something that nobody wants requires a deliberate and disciplined approach. It involves conducting thorough market research, gathering user feedback, and continuously validating assumptions. Founders must step outside the confines of the solution space and explore the problem space. By identifying real problems their target audience faces and aligning their technological expertise with these needs, founders can maximize the chances of building a product that resonates with customers.
Over-indexing on UX
Through the nature of their field, UX people are often more aware of their biases as a big part of UX is understanding human psychology and the science behind it.
Despite that, even some of the best UX folks sometimes succumb to decision paralysis and perfectionism.
UXers value real customer insights and often go to great lengths to understand customer needs and motivations in order to inform their solution. Then they bounce back and forth between the problem and solution space, trying to develop a perfect product that will solve real customer problems and do it well.
This can manifest in endless iterations of research or prototyping at the cost of committing to something and shipping it.
The reality is that no startup has enough time and resources to carry out “perfect” customer research in order to get a precise picture of customer needs. The same goes for designing the solution. Startups need to ship “something” in order to have a chance at getting traction. With traction, they can secure more resources and “buy” a chance at having another iteration.
How to achieve a balance between Business, Tech, and UX
Although the examples above are a little exaggerated, I hope I conveyed the risks of paying too much attention to one discipline at the expense of the others.
What’s clear is that you need to find a healthy balance between those disciplines in your team. So how do you do that?
Firstly, as a founder, you must recognize your own biases and leanings. What are you strongest at? What are your knowledge gaps? How does your past experience inform your decisions? Which disciplines do you find difficult to engage with?
Secondly, observe your co-founders (if you have any) and your team. What are their biases? You must ensure you have a healthy spread of voices across all three disciplines in your startup.
Thirdly, explore the mindset of a Product Manager and see how it can fill gaps between disciplines in your startup. Below are some resources that helped me develop my Product thinking.
Inspired by Marty Cagan (book)
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick (book)
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (book)
What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services by Anthony Ulwick (book)
Have you noticed the tension between the three disciplines in your startup? Have you recognized your biases and how they impact your decision-making? Let me know in the comments!
Special thanks to Mark Hogarth, Alex McAndrew, and Natalia Filipiak for reviewing drafts of this post.