While an interesting perspective, your article paints a picture of visionary entrepreneurs not being connected to actual user needs or solving a real problem. This is a broad, inaccurate generalization that perhaps was more true in the past than it is today. In my experience, today's entrepreneurs have a wealth of resources on how to zero in on real user needs. The fact is than in many cases, those entrepreneurs know the problem better than anyone else in the company, typically having spoken to more users than anyone else.
To assume that a startup entrepreneur will simply handover product direction to someone who, although skilled in product management, has less background and deep user empathy in that problem space, is foolish. This is where the empowered PM model falls flat. Most PMs in such companies who read Cagan or the derivatives become frustrated that they are not fully empowered. This needs to stop. They need to realize that founders will be prescriptive, so they should strive to add product rigour to the founder's directives rather than feeling disempowered.
Hi Joe, I certainly didn't mean to paint entrepreneurs as not solving real problems rather that focusing on a single solution (feature factory) is way more risky and likely to fail rather than focusing on the problem and iterating like crazy with different solutions (empowered teams). In my experience many entrepreneurs are their own product managers instead of handing that role off to someone else. Whether they do the role or have someone else do it, the approach more likely to lead to solving the customers' problems and the company being successful is by focusing on the outcome and not the output.
After spending the past decade building early-stage products (including one successful exit, though not a transformative one), I believe it's time to re-look at the approach to early-stage product development. The persistent statistic that "9 out of 10 startups fail" remains unchanged at-least since 2011, when I transitioned from the corporate world to the tech startup scene :)
While thought leaders like Steve Blank, Eric Ries, and Alex Osterwalder have promoted and prescribed customer discovery, lean start-up, user interviews, and the Business Model Canvas as methods to improve startup success rates, I am not sure if it had a significant impact on success rates.
As you rightly pointed out, the key issue lies in the founders' ability to critically assess both their vision and their strategic approach to product development; and to ensure they're building something truly valuable that resonates with users. Often, I see founders fail to critically evaluate whether the problem they're solving is truly worth addressing. This stems from an inability to see the world objectively, unbiased by their own beliefs or desires.
If Google and Microsoft are failing with 9 out of 10 hypotheses, and they are empowered teams, not just feature teams, doesn't that suggest all teams fail at the same rate, regardless of whether they are top-tier, Stanford graduates, empowered or feature teams? Or am I missing something?
Hi Nia, yes the data supports that observation. The difference is that feature teams typically dedicate months or even quarters to development before launching, while empowered teams might test an idea within just a few hours or at most days. Feature teams often invest hundreds or thousands of hours into a concept, confident in the leadership's vision, before any testing occurs. On the other hand, empowered teams prioritize testing numerous small ideas with minimal initial investment, allowing them to identify and refine the most promising ones through continuous iteration.
Got it, and I completely agree. If product teams have spent months and quarters failing instead of just weeks, doesn't this reflect the exact profitability crisis we're experiencing in both business and product management?
So true Mike !
While an interesting perspective, your article paints a picture of visionary entrepreneurs not being connected to actual user needs or solving a real problem. This is a broad, inaccurate generalization that perhaps was more true in the past than it is today. In my experience, today's entrepreneurs have a wealth of resources on how to zero in on real user needs. The fact is than in many cases, those entrepreneurs know the problem better than anyone else in the company, typically having spoken to more users than anyone else.
To assume that a startup entrepreneur will simply handover product direction to someone who, although skilled in product management, has less background and deep user empathy in that problem space, is foolish. This is where the empowered PM model falls flat. Most PMs in such companies who read Cagan or the derivatives become frustrated that they are not fully empowered. This needs to stop. They need to realize that founders will be prescriptive, so they should strive to add product rigour to the founder's directives rather than feeling disempowered.
Hi Joe, I certainly didn't mean to paint entrepreneurs as not solving real problems rather that focusing on a single solution (feature factory) is way more risky and likely to fail rather than focusing on the problem and iterating like crazy with different solutions (empowered teams). In my experience many entrepreneurs are their own product managers instead of handing that role off to someone else. Whether they do the role or have someone else do it, the approach more likely to lead to solving the customers' problems and the company being successful is by focusing on the outcome and not the output.
After spending the past decade building early-stage products (including one successful exit, though not a transformative one), I believe it's time to re-look at the approach to early-stage product development. The persistent statistic that "9 out of 10 startups fail" remains unchanged at-least since 2011, when I transitioned from the corporate world to the tech startup scene :)
While thought leaders like Steve Blank, Eric Ries, and Alex Osterwalder have promoted and prescribed customer discovery, lean start-up, user interviews, and the Business Model Canvas as methods to improve startup success rates, I am not sure if it had a significant impact on success rates.
As you rightly pointed out, the key issue lies in the founders' ability to critically assess both their vision and their strategic approach to product development; and to ensure they're building something truly valuable that resonates with users. Often, I see founders fail to critically evaluate whether the problem they're solving is truly worth addressing. This stems from an inability to see the world objectively, unbiased by their own beliefs or desires.
If Google and Microsoft are failing with 9 out of 10 hypotheses, and they are empowered teams, not just feature teams, doesn't that suggest all teams fail at the same rate, regardless of whether they are top-tier, Stanford graduates, empowered or feature teams? Or am I missing something?
Hi Nia, yes the data supports that observation. The difference is that feature teams typically dedicate months or even quarters to development before launching, while empowered teams might test an idea within just a few hours or at most days. Feature teams often invest hundreds or thousands of hours into a concept, confident in the leadership's vision, before any testing occurs. On the other hand, empowered teams prioritize testing numerous small ideas with minimal initial investment, allowing them to identify and refine the most promising ones through continuous iteration.
Got it, and I completely agree. If product teams have spent months and quarters failing instead of just weeks, doesn't this reflect the exact profitability crisis we're experiencing in both business and product management?