Product Led Growth Clouds

We've been hard at work on our own product led growth initiatives at Tenacity and I wanted to share some of the concepts that came up for me over the course of the past month. Concepts having to do with who we are, which arena we're playing in, what it means to have a customer, what it means to have a market, what demand means, what strategy is... beautiful concepts about who we are and who we want to be.

I can't say my economics degree's been super relevant much throughout my career. I dreamt of someday being an economist when I was in college; at the time I really couldn't think of a better career than that. But then I started working and suddenly my highest ideals collapsed into the most probable and reasonable choice for a freshly minted grad entering a labor market saturated by bachelors degrees. My first internship was at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in January 2009 immediately following the fall of Lehman Brothers which set off the global financial crisis that began in the US in September 2008. I quickly saw that work just meant a bunch of people pushing papers around towards the end of making it through another day of pushing papers around just to wake up the next day and push some more papers around. Looking back the thing that surprises me most isn't the resignation I saw but mostly just how much physical paper there was.

I remembered thinking, "Is it always like this or is that just the recession?"

Jury's still out on that one.

Anyway, throughout the journey of the actual career path I took, I began nurturing a jaded thought: was an education really just a passage of entry into a revolving door of corporate gigs? Was that really all we were doing? Was it ever about learning something? Debating something? Discovering some truth about ourselves, our world and the businesses we will someday represent and fight for?

If you haven't read Wes Bush's Product Led Growth I highly recommend it. Reading it and using it as a lens for my own product management work has me feeling like an economist again. For context, product led growth is a continuum of marketing led growth which was preceded by sales led growth. Rather than business strategy being about long sales cycles and personal relationship building or about funneling the right people in through marketing strategies and trying to find early signal from abysmal conversion rates, product led growth leads with making the product the message, the relationship builder and the lead generator all in one. By empowering customers to see, interact and experience the value of a product as quickly as possible, you're delivering something that more efficiently satisfies the people you're looking to serve.

Or it doesn't. But either way you learn something fast.

"Question everything,

Learn something,

Answer nothing"

-Euripedes

Before I begin, I must warn you.

I don't plan on answering any questions or sharing conclusions because mine honestly don't matter. Also probably something something NDA. I only hope to give you a glimpse into the mind of a newly 34 year turned product manager trying to make sense of things. I'll let my inner Euripedes lead the way here and place a premium on the questioning and the learning rather than the answering. Your answers are probably better. Cheating off of my homework might be more trouble than it's worth.

So without further ado, concepts:

Red and Blue Ocean

Let's start with demand. Tech is fun because the supply is so nimble. We're not making cups and selling them to people that want cups. We're taking a nebulous feeling, need, desire and preference and turning into something that someone wants to buy. The engineers, the ideas, the will, the drive, the resources exist to create something there's demand for. We just hope that something fits into the parameters of what a company that wants to democratize cloud cybersecurity is able to make. Otherwise we'll have to rebrand.

A big part of my job is making sense of the big mess that is the cloud cybersecurity industry and let me tell you, as I'm looking around, I couldn't tell you if the ocean's red or blue. A blue ocean is a market in which you're creating demand. A red ocean's a blood bath of competition. Depending on how you look at things, the hologram shows you what you want to see. Do I want to see a red ocean and build out our product led projects with the lens of a commodified market? Or Do I want to see a blue ocean and somehow plant myself firmly in the seat of having to convince an entire potential market that we're doing something new, something exciting, something that doesn't really exist yet... but should.

Depending on your product and market, this is something you'll have to decide on for yourself. Things were easier at Beekin where I supported a machine learning property tech product. There aren't too many of those. The market wasn't commodified. The tech was emerging and few of our competitors were leveraging machine learning to do the work we were doing. It was relatively smooth sailing, at least from a planning perspective, the waters were calm. There wasn't much interference and we didn't have too many competitors leaving a wake for us to ride.

Market Strategy

This was another fun one. Especially these days with the rise of the term growth hacker I really loved mulling over which one we were. It's become a silicon valley mantra to say "forget strategy, execution is everything!" and I do understand why but I think this expression has cost many companies greatly. Spending all your engineering power, marketing spend and sales salaries on the wrong strategy is a horrifying fate I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Not that I believe in enemies.

So what are these strategies and how do we choose? The biggest thing is deciding on what kind of customers you want to serve. Are they currently being served well? Do they have a rich variety of good products at good prices that bring them delight and alleviate their fears? Do the companies that currently serve them make them want to light themselves on fire when they have a problem and need to reach someone? Do they have too many options or are the products too complicated and sophisticated for the simple work they need to do?

The purist in me really loves the idea of the free market. And I don't mean the monopolistic, cannibalistic Big Tech landscape we find ourselves in today. Sure there are many startups but which survive? Is it really that the best will win and that the odds are ever in anyone's favor apart from FAANG? MAANG? Either way. I love the idea that whether your market is over-served or under-served, that one good idea can come in and sow enough chaos to change the balance forever.

Business should not be a given and success is not a right. I want to see the companies that rest on their laurels suffer for their hubris. I'll take the liberty, on behalf of all millennials, and say that perceiving oneself "too big to fail" should arouse terror not pride. Your market is your landscape of potential customers and how successful you are should be informed by your customer's real needs, concerns, loves and fears. Whether or not you get into Y Combinator, get funding from Peter Thiel or make yourself enough of a commodity that Elon Musk himself wants to posess you in his trophy room, at the end of the day nothing should be more important than what you actually provide for your market.

Differentiated Strategy

So let's say you've decided your customers are underserved. There aren't enough compelling choices out there so they have to choose wisely from the bottom of the barrel. Let's also say you have something of value to offer and you do it better than most. Will you choose to charge a premium for this gift to the market? Maybe you don't want world domination. Maybe you just know your worth, know you provide something someone else can't and that ultimately you just want to build a nice prosperous corner of the market where you can hang your fancy hat.

Dominant Strategy

Ok so maybe you do want world domination. A superior product/service at a lower price than most. Win at all costs and you'll figure out the details later. The Uber of X.

Disruptive Strategy

The over-complicating a ham sandwich strategy. Sure all the other guys have the bells and whistles. Your product technically does less. Maybe its simpler. Maybe it's just not as good. But it's also cheaper and maybe easier to use. You're able to take your market by the hand and tell them everything's going to be ok. It doesn't have to be so overwhelming. So complicated. So expensive.

You offer one of the most valuable things in this world: peace and hope to a fettered mind. You should be rewarded handsomely for that.

Value

I would look at value as more than the collection of bells and whistles you offer. Widgets are fun, useful and can be immensely helpful. But real value is a nexus of relative worth, utility and importance. This worth, utility and importance can be economic, social, mental or emotional. Value is also an inherently intimate concept. You evaluate the value of everything around you in the feedback loop that is your brain without being aware that you're doing it. Constantly. You evaluate your own value in the world on a regular basis whether you're introspectively writing about it in your diary or having product workshops and planning sessions about it or not.

Product led growth hinges on whether or not you understand your own value as a company and as a product. I'm not sure if I'm the exception here but this concept is the most nebulous for me. Sometimes I look up at the sky and think we look more like a heart or a sailboat or maybe just a duck. You might be more resolute than I am, always seeing the same thing in the clouds. You might be very certain about what value you bring every day you show up to work. I hope to someday have that certainty.

It sounds peaceful.

Hope this helps.

Irene.