As I've gone throughout my career, I feel like I can attribute the source of most problems to one of two things (or both):
Misaligned Incentives
Applying the wrong tool to the problem.
Casey Winters and Fareed Mosavat wrote about the second this past week. I think Fareed's quote sums it up well.
"One of the most common conflicts I've seen is when product leaders try to apply a single development process, measure of success, and strategy to all product work. For instance, while some of the steps can be similar, Growth and Feature work are fundamentally different and a lot of energy is wasted trying to make them all fit into the same process, success metric, and approach." - Fareed Mosavat, former Director of Product at Slack
They detail out that after product-market fit, there are four types of product work that product leaders need to continually evaluate. Each with their own process, measure of success, and set of strategies.
The 4 Types Of Product Work Beyond Product Market Fit
Feature Work - Creating and capturing value by extending a product's functionality and market into incremental and adjacent areas.
Growth Work - Creating and capturing value by accelerating adoption and usage by the existing market.
Scaling Work - Focusing on bottlenecks to ensure the team can continue to move forward and take on new levels of feature, growth, and product-market fit expansion work.
Product-Market Fit Expansion - Increasing the ceiling on product-market fit in a non-incremental way by expanding into an adjacent market, adjacent product, or both.
The intersection of all these form the strategy of the product.
Product Market Fit Expansion
During my time at HubSpot I helped build the division responsible for new product lines. We were squarely focused on product-market fit expansion. There were three choices:
Same Product, Expanding to an Adjacent Market - Keeping the product value prop the same but enabling it for a new adjacent market.
Same Market, Expanding to an Adjacent Product - Keeping the market the same, but launching adjacent products.
Diversification - Launching a completely new product to a completely new market.
Expanding Product-Market Fit At HubSpot
At HubSpot, we chose #2 - Same market, expanding to an adjacent product. But we didn't get it right from the beginning. One of my key early mistakes was to push the strategic direction of the new Sales product toward the prosumer market. I was ignoring our key strategic advantage: our distribution and brand among mid-market companies. We ended up course correcting and the product is successful today, but I learned this the hard way. I wrote about the full story of this here.
Why us?
The most important question for PMF Expansion is why us? You have to create something new, while leveraging a key strategic asset that you've already built. That could be brand, user base, technology, or something else. In other words, you aren't wiping the slate completely clean. You are building the best possible product, holding some set of variables the same.
More Resources and More Distribution Tempt You To Make Mistakes
Something we did get right from the start was that we carved out a small team of 8ish people, and separated them from the rest of the core functions. This allowed us to iterate fast without the constant overhead that you experience in a larger team. As we started to prove things out, we slowly added to the team. Eventually, we had enough traction with the new product to merge back into the core functions of the company.
I've seen similar efforts at other companies pour too many people or too much distribution too quickly in an effort to accelerate product-market fit expansion. Other times companies will even skip steps entirely. When you do that, it is like adding too much wood to the fire too soon, which smoothers the flame you already had going.
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