Most companies have a vision and mission statement. For it to have an impact, it needs to be compelling and ingrained in your goals and communication.

Outcomes: A vision and mission that excites investors and customers and inspires and aligns your staff’s work.

Customer development is central and ongoing. You need to discover and validate urgent and common customer needs, creating a strong roadmap, positioning, and channels.

Outcomes: A robust habit for customer discovery and validation, iterating and pivoting toward product-market fit.

By identifying and decomposing the outcome your customers care most about, and setting regular objectives and key results that improve those outcomes, you can motivate teams to do their best work and have a passionate focus on what will most help your customers.

Outcomes: We have a constant understanding of how our customers use our products and what they need. Motivated teams that are passionate about achieving business results.

As your company and product pivots, so does your market. You need to understand whether you are creating a new market, re-segmenting, or building the best product for an existing segment. What is the total and serviceable market size? What is the competition? What channels will yield the best results?

Outcomes: A well-researched market analysis that gives you and investors confidence about your revenue potential, and a clear list of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Adding instrumentation for product analytics is just the start. You need to determine what’s most important to your users, measure your product’s efficacy, and use data to drive great product decisions.

Outcomes: Confidence that you understand how your users engage with your product, and data so that you can constantly make it better.

Incorporating user feedback into your product and customer communications is crucial to make sure that you are delighting your users.

Outcomes: Constant user feedback that checks your biases and provides the aha moments for crucial pivots.

Building a strong roadmap provides motivation, confidence, and focus for the company and customers. You need a roadmap that focuses on the most important benefits, balances innovation and iteration, and provides the flexibility to respond to change.

Outcomes: A roadmap that gives customers and staff confidence, gives engineers focus and motivation, and is flexible to the dynamics of a startup.

A product launch is a unique opportunity to grab attention with customers, prospects, press, and analysts. Each launch is unique, but there are principles that maximize the impact and accelerate growth. Timing with an event such as a developer conference can create a flywheel effect for brand recognition and revenue acceleration.

Outcomes: Launches that generate enthusiasm and capture the imagination of prospects, well-timed with the market and its most important events.

Choosing the right pricing and price are critical. How does your customer derive value from your product? The choice of subscription, consumption, or other licensing is based on how customers think about the value.

Outcomes: The optimal pricing model and price points that reflect the value customers get from your product.

Hiring the right product leader or product manager is critical and challenging. They need a sense of urgency, vision, curiosity, diligence, and ability to not just jump into today’s challenges, but embrace tomorrow’s.

Outcomes: A head of product with vision and the chops to let the founders focus on business goals and growth. An outstanding team that challenges, complements, and supports one another.

The triad between a product manager, engineering manager, and designer are crucial so that accountabilities are clear and they can help one another.

Outcomes: Outstanding partnerships between roles so that teams can focus on goals and not friction.

There are unique challenges and opportunities when you have a product used by a technical audience. You need to have the right product, messaging, and organization to foster an enthusiastic developer community.

Outcomes: A product strategy that emphasizes developer ergonomics, open core, onboarding, self-service, and an enthusiastic community.