Small changes in how we describe a product or startup can lead to very different conclusions about their chances for breakout success. Here are a few that I’ve been thinking about.
Building the product vs. The product being built
It’s easy to fall into the trap of the product being built; I’ve certainly done it in the past. This can be hidden behind a veneer of “customer centricity”, but in reality represents a lack of a cohesive and compelling view of the future that customers are eager to support.1
The era-defining products are always built by founders and builders whose opinions don’t fully align with today's reality, but are compelling enough to build momentum to bring their customers along for the ride.
If you find yourself redefining your roadmap most weeks, or if customers over-praise your responsiveness to adding new features, you may be erring too much on the side of the product being built.
If you occasionally have uncomfortable conversations with customers about the near-term roadmap, but those same customers are fully bought into your vision and rave about capabilities you’re adding that they had never thought about, you’re building the product.
Behavior Change vs. Changed Behavior
“Behavior change” has been a divisive concept in venture. Some view it as a positive because that upfront effort can lead to greater stickiness, while others view it as a negative because it usually comes with a longer time to value and lack of repeatability.
The truth, as always, is somewhere in between: behavior change is often the result of top-down mandates and significant hand-holding from the startup, but if you can create enough customer love and ROI you can buy time to make the behavior change period shorter.
I prefer to flip the phrase and look for “changed behavior” in a customer base. What are the (voluntary) differences in how a team or department operates that arise from adopting a new product? Are customers saying they can never return to the old way of doing things? As long as you can get to this end state, you are creating enough value to validate you’ve built something that truly matters.
Self-serve vs. Self-service
Self-serve means being able to access something without having to jump through unnecessary hoops. Self-service means completing the desired task without being bottlenecked by others. The magical product experiences are usually self-service.
This ethos is even more critical now as every product adds an AI copilot.2 But most of these capabilities are self-serve: they allow users to pull the information they need (a bit) more effectively than before, but the user still has to think about what they want to accomplish and manually execute most of the actions.
Hopefully, products will soon gravitate towards presenting the relevant information, prompting the right actions automatically, and enabling everyone to become the champion of their own goals.
Others have written about this as the next feature fallacy
See more thoughts on copilots here -
