Dan Greenberg - The Product Management Stack

The Product Manager Stack

As mentioned elsewhere, I was an Offering Manager. Think of that as a "full-stack product manager," but in truth, the stack extends from Technical Product Management all the way up to business Strategy. How much of this is covered by each individual varies, but it's generally a good assumption that there is too much to know and too much to do for one person to do a good job at all of it. Therefore, in a resource-constrained startup, choices should be made on division of responsibilities and prioritization of elements of the stack. Here we'll discuss some of the factors which should be, but are often not, considered in setting those priorities.

The Stack

First we define our terms a bit. his table is neither definitive nor complete. It's just a jumping off point for the discussion below. Your titles may vary.

Product Management Stack

So What?

Early startups focus, often entirely, on the top of the stack. Engineer-founders (and remember, I am an engineer by training) tend to have tunnel vision on the very top. And this shows in the pitch. If you ask these technical companies what sort of customer feedback they've gotten... well.. the answers are often disappointing. But even if the founders have talked to customers... even if they have pilots... the answer can fall short of getting the check.

Why? Because experienced investors often see beyond the product and its innovation. They project forward from the Value Case to the Business Case. Most often, they start thinking about go-to-market (GTM) and how you will get all of the other pieces to align to make sales happen. I'll probably write a whole piece on Offering Management at some point. While the lack of thought about the Offering is both naïve and natural in a resource-constrained startup, it can make investors run.

Strategy

But today's piece is really about the last bit of the stack: Strategy. Strategy is easy and obvious, right? OK... story time:

I was leading a follow-on bridge for a company in my angel group. The feedback from the angels was lukewarm. When I analyzed why, there was a consistent thread in the feedback that people did not see how the company would win in the market. That is, the pitch had been all about the problem they were solving and how they would develop and bring their product to market. But everyone knows (or should know) that a "build it and they will come" strategy is likely to fail. And in this case, the "they" are globe-spanning companies with a lot more things to worry about. Focusing on Product Management was a fail.

The CEO and I discussed. And then discussed some more. I asked, "if your product tends to be 'winner take all' in a given market, how do you make sure you're the winner?" That led him to look at all the things they were doing and categorize them into driving to a win (in a market) for the company, or not. He focused his strategy, thought about what else would gain momentum... not for the product, but for the company. And then he pitched again. Same CEO; two utterly different pitches. The second one got the deal.

The moral of the story is that frequently the strategy counts more than the product itself, at least to investors. You will often see pitch coaching that encourages you to "paint a picture" of you as a successful company. (One accelerator I know insists that you include a slide titled "How I'll Grow to be a $100M Company.") Meh. Anyone can work a spreadsheet to get to some big exponential number. Tell me what you'll do strategically, not what the result will be. You control the former; you can't control the latter.

Product Management optimizes the Value Case. Strategy optimizes the Business Case. Offering Management bridges the two. All three are needed for success.

And given the effort to get those three right, entrepreneurs often forget the Investor Case. We'll cover that in a separate post.

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