PRODUCT PIONEERS - Part two - Building and Shipping Great Products
Part 2 of a 3 part series offering a peek inside the minds of the builders behind Australia’s most iconic startups.
This is the second article of a three-part series on starting and building your business, with Rampersand’s product counsel leaders. Did you miss part one? READ IT HERE.
By Rod Hamilton, Venture Partner at Rampersand
No founder starts their business alone. You need a great support system and a great team to help you along your journey, even if it's a friend, spouse or family member.
This is a fundamental lesson in product building. You need to fill your product team with fabulous people. They will iterate their way to success and help bring your vision to life. But finding these particular skill sets early on can be challenging. Product management barely existed in Australia when Culture Amp started, so we had to look to markets like the US.
One of the traits of this decade that’s different from the past decade is how product-centric and product-experienced Australia’s ecosystem is now. Take Hatch as an example. Many of their team members were early at Canva, Culture Amp and Dovetail, passing on valuable skills and knowledge to shorten the learning curve to create and ship great products.
Of course, building a successful product has many layers, as founders and product leaders Sam Kroonenburg, Kirsten Mann, and Adam Jacobs attest. I asked them to share their lessons and insights and my experience to offer advice for any product builder.
What were some important lessons when building your product?
Kirsten Mann, the Chief Product Officer at Prospection and who has helped to build award-winning product and service experiences for over two decades, says:
‘Get real feedback fast,
You can’t build in isolation. You need to get something in front of users as soon as you can and work out which customer requests matter. Prioritise the must-haves, not just the nice-to-haves.’
Similarly,, at Culture Amp, we learned that speed to market really matters. Prioritising what to build for your customers can be hard, but as product leaders,, we often overlook speed to market. You learn when you ship.
Sam Kroonenburg, co-CEO and co-founder of AI advertising platform Cuttable echoes this sentiment.
‘When you’re very early on, you need to keep shipping and trying things until you see initial signs of positivity and success with customers.
Then double down on this and build the next "right" thing. Follow the path of success and ignore failures. Design your efforts to be low cost so the collateral damage and cost of failure is low.’
When building a product, it pays to be data-informed, not data-driven. Data is vital to help you know if you’re on the right track, but some leaps you need to make aren’t in the data.
‘We’ve spent a lot of time researching and talking to employees and candidates to understand their needs and what’s working and not working in the current job market, and then a lot of time building the horizons of our platform,’ recalls Adam Jacobs, co-founder of AI-marketplace Hatch.
‘Our goal has always been to be the best place to match candidates for jobs. When we started, we focused on interns and graduates. We learned a lot from that… it showed that our matching technology worked, not just for students but for people more broadly. Since then, we’ve been expanding our marketplace to more and more types of jobs, including permanent roles, to capture more data, do more matching and learn more about our models and algorithms.’
Team and culture matter a lot, says Kirsten. ‘The best products are built by teams who trust each other, challenge each other, and are aligned on the bigger picture. You must also bridge the gap between product and sales teams; they aren’t separate worlds. Understanding how your product fits into a commercial model is just as important as nailing the user experience.’
You also need to be clear on who you are genuinely building for; you’re optimising the experience for a particular segment or type of customer. You can say yes to customers who aren’t your ideal customer profile, but never forget the customers for whom you’re optimising the experience.
As Sam reflects,
‘There is a 'nugget of truth' at the core of every great business. Some really simple insight that seems obvious (hidden in plain sight, you could say) but no one else in market is acting as if it is true. From here, be really focused on the core you need to deliver to make this come true and put your blinders on. Ignore everything else.’
READ PART THREE HERE.
Did you miss part one? READ IT HERE.
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