Good advice here on when (and when not!) to hire the first product manager in a startup. This is also a good reminder to “let PMs be PMs”…

PMs are the strategy arm of this process, and should be empowered to own the roadmaps for how they’ll better the business, not just the execution of getting things built. In an ideal world, PMs will have better decision-making and execution than you within their domains due to focus and proximity to customer needs. This is how you scale. If you continue to hold all of the strategic decisions close to the vest and use PMs as glorified interns, you’re wasting all of the focus that they could be bringing to bear.

This is a thoughtful, well-argued essay by Benedict Evans about where we’re at with LLMs.

Whenever we get a new tool, we start by forcing it to fit our existing ways of working, and then over time we change the work to fit the new tool. We try to treat ChatGPT as though it was Google or a database instead of asking what it is useful for. How can we change the work to take advantage of this?

Good points here from Teresa Torres about deadline-driven development, especially the need to take change management slowly:

If your stakeholders are insisting you use date-based roadmaps, I wouldn’t engage in the ideological war about deadlines and predictable work. Instead, start with a feature-based roadmap. Give your stakeholders what they are asking for, and over time, you can introduce opportunities and outcomes.

I didn’t realize that there’s a strategy backlash going on in some corners of the internet, but Packy McCormick has a good defense of the importance of having a good strategy:

Execution without strategy is wasteful and tragic. Just as “Companies that have the best products, most talented people, and fastest growth are precisely the ones for which moats are most important,” companies that are the best at execution are precisely the ones for which strategy is most important. They’re the only ones that have a shot. The better you are at execution, the faster you can run in any direction. A good strategy helps you run fast in the right direction.

He also provides a good summary definition of what strategy is, based on the (must-read!) book Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters:

A strategy is a high-level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty, designed through recognizing the challenge (diagnosis), setting a direction to overcome it (guiding policy), and detailing steps to implement the policy (coherent actions).

The biggest problem I’ve seen in organizations that struggle with good strategy is that everyone wants a strategy but it’s very hard to figure out how to get started with its creation. It is such a lofty, nebulous concept, and everyone has a different idea of how to go about it. So it’s really important to define what it is and what it’s for, and get broad agreement on that, before starting to create a strategy. To put it another way, make sure you define the black hole words.

For more on this, check out my (very long) case study on Collaborative Product Strategy Development.

Here’s a great post by Camille Fournier about The Product Culture Shift, and how every part of an engineering culture needs to change when product managers are added to traditional software infrastructure organizations.

To start, let’s be clear about one thing: as tempting as it might be, just hiring product managers won’t fix this problem. Even if you could find enough good product managers who want this type of job, which you can’t, product managers are only useful when they are paired with willing engineering teams. If the engineering teams don’t feel a sense of ownership for delivering a great product to their customers, product managers are unlikely to close that gap, and they will more likely turn into glorified backlog groomers than true product leaders.

Excellent post by danah boyd, reminding us that with social networks it all comes down to nurturing the network dynamics, not the technical features.

That’s the thing about social media. For people to devote their time and energy to helping enable vibrancy, they have to gain something from it. Something that makes them feel enriched and whole, something that gives them pleasure (even if at someone else’s pain). Social media doesn’t come to life through military tactics. It comes to life because people devote their energies into making it vibrant for those that are around them. And this ripples through networks.

Oliver Jay wrote a 3-part essay about what he calls “The PLG Trap”, where product-led growth companies grow to a certain point and then suddenly sees that growth slow with no obvious ways through the slowdown. From the introduction to the essays, Oliver says this usually happens after an initial (and initially successful!) expansion into the enterprise market:

Quite simply, despite the complex security and administrative features you’ve launched, your product has not evolved to becoming broadly “enterprise-ready” for the majority of your enterprise prospects.

At this point, you may feel trapped–the PLG Trap. You’ve set growth expectations externally and internally based on how revenue (in particular, from the upmarket segments) has grown in the past few years.

However, what drove revenue in the past, in terms of your product offering as well as your sales and marketing motions, is unsustainable. There is no more bottoms-up, low-hanging fruit to feed the larger sales and marketing engine you’ve built. To pursue sustained revenue growth, you must tolerate a lower efficiency…only to now be punished by the public markets in what appears to be the beginning of a recession.

The essays go through several reasons why companies fall into this trap, and also how to avoid it by making smarter decision about sales, marketing, and product roadmaps early on.

Ok, here’s the thing. I didn’t share this talk I’m doing on Thursday when it was announced because as much as I tried, I just didn’t feel like the story was coming together. Writing this talk was much harder than some others that I’ve done, but I think I finally got there last night. So with only a few hours to spare, here you go…

In Life beyond OKRs: Tools for goal-setting I’m going to talk about our team’s foundation (principles & values), how we set goals, and how we plan and execute. If that’s your thing, come join us!

Elena Verna presents a great guide to product-led sales for B2B products here here:

In a traditional top-down sales approach, the sales team is motivated to close the largest and newest deals to account for the high acquisition cost and ensure profitability.

In contrast, in a product-led sales approach, the sales team gets involved with the account much earlier in the problem lifecycle, and the initial contract value is smaller. It’s important to note that in top-down sales, the buyer is typically captured during the high maturity stage of the problem. In contrast, in product-led sales, the account is acquired earlier in the lifecycle. Therefore, the landed annual recurring revenue (land ARR) is not comparable between the two channels. Product-led sales’ primary goal is to expand by continuously growing with the account, which is where most of the revenue is generated. Overselling the account during the initial contract can be detrimental as it may disrupt the expansion journey.

There are a couple of other recent posts on product-led sales that I found useful:

• What is product-led sales? The future of selling software by Wes Bush.
• Your guide to product-led sales with Figma and Hex’s Jesus Requena (from Kyle Poyar’s newsletter).
• The PLGeek Guide to Product Qualified Accounts (PQAs) by Ben Williams.