13 ms·

Product-focused and sales-focused companies

202 points by asplake 6y ago

qzw 6y ago
TLDR: find product/market fit.
achow 6y ago
Surprised that this post is at no.1! The content does not have much depth and seems to be a build up for a silver bullet solution (author's workshop). In my Lean Product Management workshops you’ll learn how to develop product strategy, research your market, set goas, prioritize ideas...
- bitcharmer 6y ago
  Sadly the front page is subjected to manual steering from HN mods. This is most likely how we get submissions like this to be successful here. https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html
  - detaro 6y ago
    The suggestion that this is a post the mods would positively influence is fairly ridiculous.
    - bitcharmer 6y ago
      If you read carefully, you'll see my comment says: "posts like this" instead of "this post".
      - alisonkisk 6y ago
        If "like" means "this statement means nothing" then it's best not to write the statement at all.
  - dang 6y ago
    We actually downweighted this post somewhat. Re "manual steering", that's just another way of saying "moderated" or "curated" (or, some people's favorite, "censored") - no? HN is a curated site and always has been: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20curated&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... We don't tend to boost submissions like the OP though. If you want to see the sort that we do boost, there are lots of examples at https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool and https://news.ycombinator.com/invited https://news.ycombinator.com/invited.
    - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
      What is listed at /pool? I haven't seen that one. Edit: found it, it's probably the second chance pool: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#second-chance-pool https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#second...
- someguydave 6y ago
  I suspect this post was promoted via a voting ring.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dang 6y ago
    I looked at the data and that's not likely. The early upvoters were all well-established, legit users with no obvious connection between them.
dmak 6y ago
I skimmed the article, but I would argue product focused has to understand everything including being “market-focused”. You need to understand what the market is asking to guide your product decisions.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
Related to this article, I work at Shopify and they have 3 rules which are loosely as follows: 1) Build a great product 2) Make money 3) 1 always comes before 2
- arkitaip 6y ago
  I can't think of a single company that would advocate anything else and yet all of them prioritize money over product, even if it means enacting petty user-hostile policies.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    When you're large enough growth slows down so you make more money by building a moat and squeezing your customers. When you're still growing quickly a good product and the resulting growth leads to more revenue.
  - weeboid 6y ago
    Ahh, you are mistaking Great Product™ (performs in the market) for great product (genuinely moves humanity forward)
- dnndev 6y ago
  Most companies have a list like this and other values they claim but rarely follow. In all large companies at one point the stars aligned and you had smart, connected devs and sales people that made a great product, executed and sold. This fades after a while, you get academics and newbies that derail and complicated a good thing. I have seen it over and over again. Hulu is a good example, started out very strong and slowly became a terrible product. Til this I dont understand the UI.
sophrocyne 6y ago
If this is your definition of “product-led”, you have a bad Product team. The Product teams job is to make sure that you aren’t relying on the “if you build it they will come” approach to product development. One of the only real arguments against product-led, as I see it, is when the quality of the product is less correlated with success (e.g., low competition markets with long contracts), and I’d still argue against it. Who wants to build a business strategy around products that don’t fit a market need? Yes, Product needs to work with Sales and Marketing to determine whether something is valuable to the customer and viable for the business. No, Sales teams are not the best decision-maker for “what should we build next”. Before reading his bio, I’d have thought the author had only a cursory understanding of real product management. Given his background, I’m more inclined to believe this is click-bait.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
  How would you define product-led? Or can you link to some examples? Thank you!
  - kyriee 6y ago
    Product-led typically means "driven by customer needs" but also being able to make the correct trade-offs vis a vis engineering and sales considerations. That is, delivering something that is in line with what you can build and not delivering "value" that the customer is not ready to pay for. Which can be opposed to "sales driven" where the sales team sold something, engineering has to play catch up, which can lead to technical debt and lack of focus mid-term. Or engineering led, where the engineering team will decide priorities and might push cool tech demos that will never become successful products. Google being the best example of this type of culture. Edit: article is terrible. He creates strawmans to sell his wares. As always, beware of consultant blogs.
    - Closi 6y ago
      You are describing customer-led IMO. Product led is about building the best product, with the “best” taking into account customer wants. But product is just one dimension of customer needs, and customer needs are fulfilled across all other departments either directly or indirectly. A sales-led company can still be driven by customer needs, so the definition is way too broad. Also the statement that “product led” means “making the correct trade off between sales/engineering” is too broad. You could just as easily say “sales/engineering led” means “having the correct mix of product”.
HugoDaniel 6y ago
meh, a not-so-kind but equally apt critic can also be made for the case that the article is trying to promote, the so called "market-driven" companies. most edge funds companies can be considered almost 100% market driven...
rancar2 6y ago
The historical reasons for sales-driven and product-led was due to internal politics. As noted in the article, these are internally focused, as most employees work “in” the business and not “on” the business. I would recommend using different wording than the article, as Market-Focused will lead to focus on competitors. This is again leads to focus on the wrong party, not the right party and the reason why the organization should exist and consume resources including people’s/employees’ time. Mission-driven in both for-profit and non-profit context works very well to focus the team on the right party (customer, patients, citizens, large enterprises in insurance, the local environment, etc. “target population”) as the organization scales to provide value to the target population. A shared mission to ensure the fulfillment of the primary reason for the existence will ensure the team focuses on delivery of value to the right party, target population. However, the mission needs to provide enough value to justify its existence, and with three parts: (1) large value proposition, (2) large target population and (3) large unmet need, then you have a justification for the continued existence of the organization and the resources it consumes.
- jka 6y ago
  Agree broadly with what you're saying; having a common mission is a good way to align on goals within a company and also with customers and community. It's debatable, but the phrase "target population" seems potentially non-ideal from a cultural perspective. To me that has some negative connotations, implying that the recipients might not be aware/participating/accepting. It feels like companies should want to support and encourage their audience, as opposed to pushing things onto them. Perhaps a minor point, but I think that if you develop a large organizational culture which begins to repeat various phrases or terms, then those words and the way they are perceived become significant (in proportion to the company's influence).
  - rancar2 6y ago
    I fully agree that “target population” isn’t the best wording. If you have a suggestion of another phrase in English that would be readily understood without further definition, please do share as I would love to find a better phrase than target population. I typically use just “target” but I was avoiding being ambiguous while attempting to be brief. Again, “target” also carries a lot of cultural baggage for its military associations. To go a bit deeper, underneath my comment is method of accomplishing a mission through organizational/program design, where a mission consists of: verb. target. outcome. measurement. * To maintain brevity in the above format, the “need” and the “how” may be implied in the mission statement but are typically not well covered by the above suggested mission statement format, but should be codified in a logical model of the programs/executable units of work. Examples of missions: 1. Living Goods = save. african kids’. lives. reducing child mortality. 2. One Arce Fund = get. african families. out of extreme poverty. increasing income. 3. Island Conservation = save. island species. from extinction. recovering species populations living. Definitions: 1.Verb = The measurable action of the program taking place on the target to achieve the outcome. 2. Target = The person/place/thing that is the served by the program. 3. Outcome = The measurable benefit that is expected for the target. 4. Measurement = The primary set of data being collected as an indication that the outcome is being achieved. Edit: formatting adjustments
weeboid 6y ago
Ha, I got past the sales-driven company caricature, into the product led, and thought: "Well, like many things, it depends. "Which blend best suits the market?" Market driven companies, ta-da! Lol
whack 6y ago
From what I've skimmed, the author blames sales-focused companies for being too obsessed with capturing value. And this is a bad thing. He also blames product-focused companies for being too obsessed with delivering value. And this is a bad thing. His silver bullet at the end seems to be that the company should be marked-focused. Which appears to be shorthand for both delivering value and capturing value. Ie, being sales-focused or product-focused is bad. Instead, you should strive to be BOTH! It seems analogous to me telling NFL coaches that being defense-focused is bad because they won't score very many points. And being offense-focused is also bad, because they will give up too many points. Instead, they should focus on BOTH! Maybe I'm being naive, but this seems a tad obvious, and not all that useful.
- deleted 6y ago
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- spzb 6y ago
  That was my takeaway too so if you're naive, you're not alone.
  - crmd 6y ago
    What’s funny is that bullshit factories like McKinsey and BCG convert shallow insights such as this into billion dollar pipelines. You could turn this blog post into a PowerPoint presentation, and corporate boards will happily pay you $250k a pop to interview people and diagnose their company as too sales or product driven, with the recommendation to become market driven. Even the football offense/defense thing, delivered verbally during the board presentation, will be met with deep nods of understanding and help energize the room and make you look like a rockstar. Some of the board members will literally be thinking, “we need a CEO like this guy”. Once their check clears, you give the same analysis to the next company down the road for another $250k.
    - JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
      Even if it's the placebo effect, if McKinsey can make organizations operate more effectively with pre-fab slide decks, then it's worth it. They are providing value to the organization.
zerotolerance 6y ago
My experience with “sales-driven” is sales people selling things that don’t exist, ill-defined, and delivery dates that are demand based. This leads to all corners cut, products that can only be sold once. In other words, sales-driven companies are a way to turn your company into a consultancy.
deleted 6y ago
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indymike 6y ago
How about option D: Balance. Sales, marketing, product (and the g&a team) are all crucial to success. The market, sales, and product all can be signals... But without balance the biggest opportunities and dangers will be missed.
- neom 6y ago
  That's exactly right Indymike. Business should be vision and mission lead. If people have an understanding of the CHANGE they want to capture in the world (either by creating it or taking advantages of it), a good leadership will know when to pull on the levers inside the company of the business at the right time to complete a mission on a step towards the vision. Sometimes that's leaning into sales, sometimes it's leaning into product, sometimes it's leaning into technology, sometimes it's playing them all together. Business is more art than science, and the startup trope should be "I'm going to capitalize on change" not "I'm going to change the world".
Closi 6y ago
I think the biggest issue with the “product-led” mindset is the one dimensionality of it. You need the right balance of everything in reality, including sales, and the mix is different for different companies.
stephc_int13 6y ago
There is not a single general purpose recipe to do business. My advice would be to understand and focus on your strengths, and to avoid cargo-cults. And yes, alignment in any company or team is extremely important, this is what leadership is for.
0xbadcafebee 6y ago
Ultimately these are just generalizations. Your company can be focused on both and regularly fail to execute either. What the execs know is that all they need to do is generate profits. There are many tricks you can use to do that, even if you have shitty product that customers don't like. This is where established behemoths sometimes end up, to the point that people hate their brand, but use it anyway. At that point the customer is just poultry, and the company's focus becomes keeping foxes out of the hen house.
jdauriemma 6y ago
Did anyone else immediately think of “The Conjoined Triangles of Success?”
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  Yeah, the chart gives off that vibe 100%: https://itamargilad.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Yin-Yang-Final-1-scaled.jpg https://itamargilad.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Yin-Yang-...
nbzso 6y ago
One question? What we have to do when the market is not yet created? May be the author ignores the idea of iPhone? Can you imagine Jobs to be "market focused"? When there is no market for touch based phones? Market focused by the way perfectly describes Apple of today. The Irony is big.
hacknews20 6y ago
Just be customer led. Stop making it blah.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
a4isms 6y ago
Most essays like this begin by pointing out that a company that over-focuses on X is headed for trouble, for almost any value of X. They then present Y, which if properly pursued, will solve the problem of X. Both sides of this argument are subject to “No True Scotsman” problems. By definition, over-focusing on X is going to be problematic, that’s tautological. But what about companies that are giving X the right amount of focus? Likewise, of course if you’re doing X badly and then you change to doing Y “right,” things will get better. But how much of that is X vs Y, and how much is magically going from doing something wrong to doing something right? The essay pitches some education on how to do “market-focused” right. Fair enough, let’s grant that in the hands of the well-intentioned, doing market-focused right will lead to success. Ok, but will taking a similar approach to fixing sales-focused also help? Is the assumption that sales-focused cannot be done right under any circumstances? I’m not sure the essay establishes this. Same for product-led growth (“PLG”), the current hotness in product management thanks in large part to Amazon’s success. Ok, if PLG done wrong is bad, can we fix PLG and do it right? So my first observation is that the argument “Doing X badly is worse than doing Y correctly, so do Y correctly” neglects scenarios where we fix X. Is that an option as well? — My second observation is the dual of the above. What makes us think we can do Y correctly? Now don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting the author’s educational offering is suspect. Come to your own conclusion about this, just like evaluating any vendor of a silver bullet. I’m suggesting something else: For those companies doing sales-led or product-led badly, what if the problem is the company and its leadership, not the methodology? In that case, you have to fix the company and its leadership, or they’ll bring their problems with them to “market-led growth.” I think of this second scenario often. Consider the time when companies were transitioning from shipping software on media to SaaS. Continuous integration and other practices transformed the very notion of “shipping,” and solved many problems companies had with death marches to press golden masters. Shipping software on media was X, SaaS was Y. Many companies benefited greatly from the shift. But they were usually companies that were already doing reasonably well with shipping software on media. If a company was good at shipping software on media, switching to SaaS was a shock, but it removed the limitations imposed by physical media and distribution. But if a company had trouble shipping quality software to plan with physical media, it didn’t magically become good at shipping quality software incrementally with SaaS. SaaS did not fix problems with engineering culture or leadership. — p.s. None of the above applies for much of HN’s demographic: If you’re starting from scratch, you don’t have a “Doing X badly” problem to begin with. You can sit down and evaluate sales-led versus product-led versus market-focus purely on their individual merits. This is one of the great advantages of starting from scratch. But even if you don’t have a “Doing X badly” problem, be careful with arguments that contrast “Doing X badly” with “Doing Y right.” A balanced approach to choosing X versus Y would be to compare doing X right with doing Y right, and also to think about whether X or Y is going to be easier to do right for you in your situation.
polote 6y ago
The beginning of the article is pretty on point. Most PM dream about working in a pure product-led company and spend their time complaining that it is not how things should be done. Which is a big misunderstanding of the PM job, I've written before how to navigate the PM in role in Saas enterprise (very likely sales driven) [1] Actually if you search the web for PM resources you will mostly find insights on how to run in a product-led environment. Which is funny because most of companies are not operating that way. It is even more funny because it is easier to fail a product-led company than a sales driven one The rest of the article is bullshit to enroll people for his workshops. There is no better gurus than ones who invent terms who don't exist and then spend their time explaining how genius it is. A market-focused seems to be the kind of companies that someone who has never run a company would imagine. Wins on all markets, but also on the product and the sales. And we all know that this is impossible [1] https://blog.luap.info/product-management-in-saas-b2b-enterprise-is-easy.html https://blog.luap.info/product-management-in-saas-b2b-enterp...
- deleted 6y ago
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dasil003 6y ago
This is not Sales vs Product. This is bad product management, full stop. It is not sales’ responsibility to define the product, it is product’s responsibility to do that, taking into account sales requests, market analysis, executive vision, user feedback and engineering feasibility. In any given situation it takes a lot of expertise and judgement (and often luck!) to know where they need to be focused. Trying to reduce actual product problems to some simple knob between caricatured role definitions will help no one except management consultants. In reality product management failure is very contextual to the problem at hand-—details matter.
k__ 6y ago
The problem I saw most of the time was devs simply see value differently or ignore it completely. In the best case they think about solving a user problem as directly as possible. I the worst case they just want to apply a technology or paradigm as correctly as possible, and everyone has their own opinion on how this is done. But successful software is a non-trivial function of solving a users problem and extracting the most money with that solution from the market. That and privacy, security, performance, usability, etc. pp. Nobody cares how your solution is a perfect application for K8s. If they can't find it because of non-existing marketing, it won't work. If you can't make money to support it's maintenance, it won't work.
golemotron 6y ago
Leader-Led is better and it solves both problems.
simon_kun 6y ago
How mission driven teams at FAANG build $1Tn+ market cap: 1. Product teams create utility at ~zero marginal cost per additional user 2. Platform teams drive distribution 3. Monetization teams convert utility to cash 4. GOTO 1
- thewarrior 6y ago
  Never heard it put so succinctly. This should be higher up.
- polote 6y ago
  - Facebook: Yeah more or less that - Apple: far from zero marginal cost per additional user - Amazon: far from zero marginal cost per additional user - Netflix : More or less works, if driven by the content they create. But not a product - Google: Has monopoly on Ads search, all others projects bring close to nothing Except Facebook, I don't see how 'zero marginal cost per additional user'-products have any impact of the revenue these company make
- rajacombinator 6y ago
  How it really works, even (especially) at FAANG: 1. Get one thing right. 2. Sit back and make my monies.
xyzzy21 6y ago
There's a 3rd axis missing - Customer Centered which can and should drive both Product-led and Sales-driven. Both Product-led and Sales-driven alone are putting the cart before the horse. The horse is the customer first. When you do it right, you get all three! When you simply use a recipe book of heuristics without understanding anything about economics (btw a university Economics course teaches you next to NOTHING) and your particular market, then you are practicing Cargo-Cult Superstition business. You might as well strangle chickens and wave the entrails over your lobby door for all the good it will do you!
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  You hit the nail on the head. Talking to the customer in some way shape or form should be the first step that informs whether you take a more product or sales led approach and more importantly /why/. Without a customer centric approach, all you end up with is (as you point out) a solution in search of a problem -- a poor place to be.
crsv 6y ago
The introduction of the idea of a "Market-focused" company is so trivial and unimaginative here that I can't think for a second anyone worth their salt as an operator would do much more than roll their eyes. This kind of content that creates these sort of false dichotomies that capture some bad aspects of poor business strategy and then present some idea where you correct these wrongs as novel is just so... brutally uninteresting. The fact that this stuff floats to the top of HN as become as unsurprising as it is disappointing. Some "bad thing bad" title that people don't even bother reading gets pumped up, and then when you take a moment to dig in and digest the content, it's a whole bunch of nothin'.
KingOfCoders 6y ago
Once in my live I would love to work at a tech driven company.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  Same, but for some reason it’s rare for me to get interviews at the type of places.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
stedman 6y ago
Great clickbait, awful content Formula: 1. set up strawmen on either extreme 2. argue for the middle Being sales-led vs product-led is not about your specifying your "company DNA". It's about choosing the go-to-market strategy that maximizes your LTV:CAC. And as the market changes, so too can your GTM strategy. As evidence: HubSpot successfully transitioned their GTM from sales- to product-led. OpenViewVenture published a guide explaining it: https://openviewpartners.com/blog/hubspots-5-strategies-for-transitioning-to-a-product-led-organization/ https://openviewpartners.com/blog/hubspots-5-strategies-for-...
RocketSyntax 6y ago
Product is already market-focused. As a career product manager that has also worked as a software engineer and a salesman - I find your article offensive and polarizing.
for_i_in_range 6y ago
tl;dr: be a Consumer-Driven company.
rushabh 6y ago
Both paths, sales or product (or market) can lead to success. The key is always execution.
mwcampbell 6y ago
When reading the caricature of a product-focused company, I couldn't help but think of NeXT. NeXT was before my time (I was about 8 when the first NeXT computer came out, and completely unaware of what they did until decades later), but I've read about them and watched their first launch event [1]. It's obvious from that presentation that they were state-of-the-art, way ahead of their time. But from what I've read, NeXT computers didn't sell very well. I'd be interested in any detailed postmortem of NeXT's failures. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92NNyd3m79I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92NNyd3m79I
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  The impression I got at the time was that NeXT was selling a fairly high-end Unix workstation with features that made it a better desktop PC than contemporary workstations, but lacked the enterprise sales experience to hit most of the Unix workstation market (which also had considerable vendor lock-in, so it was hard to get people to switch) while having a price point that, despite the features, made it a very hard sell as a PC replacement. The nonstandard storage on the original NeXT probably didn’t help, but that waa addressed quickly with the second generation machines which had more traditional storage.
motohagiography 6y ago
X-driven company is really a recruiting message, it's not a strategy. The only thing that drives a company is its growth stage. tech + team = investment driven idea + team = investment driven investment + team = product driven revenue + product = sales driven investment + product = engineering driven revenue - product = acquisition driven A product is something someone both wants and pays for, otherwise it's just a technology. Might build this out, but it's pretty consistent. IMO, etc...
xbar 6y ago
"The beating heart of the company is its product teams, full of rockstar developers, designers and PMs, and rich in methodology and “culture”. But these folks are compelled to follow the grand vision of management, which leads to convoluted product extravaganzas that don’t blow anyone away." Garbage opinion piece.
fukmbas 6y ago
Product led is just an excuse for MBA types to insert themselves into IT departments and leech high paying salaries.

202 points by asplake 6y ago

qzw 6y ago

TLDR: find product/market fit.

Surprised that this post is at no.1! The content does not have much depth and seems to be a build up for a silver bullet solution (author's workshop). In my Lean Product Management workshops you’ll learn how to develop product strategy, research your market, set goas, prioritize ideas...

bitcharmer 6y ago
Sadly the front page is subjected to manual steering from HN mods. This is most likely how we get submissions like this to be successful here. https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html
- detaro 6y ago
  The suggestion that this is a post the mods would positively influence is fairly ridiculous.
  - bitcharmer 6y ago
    If you read carefully, you'll see my comment says: "posts like this" instead of "this post".
    - alisonkisk 6y ago
      If "like" means "this statement means nothing" then it's best not to write the statement at all.
- dang 6y ago
  We actually downweighted this post somewhat. Re "manual steering", that's just another way of saying "moderated" or "curated" (or, some people's favorite, "censored") - no? HN is a curated site and always has been: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20curated&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... We don't tend to boost submissions like the OP though. If you want to see the sort that we do boost, there are lots of examples at https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool and https://news.ycombinator.com/invited https://news.ycombinator.com/invited.
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    What is listed at /pool? I haven't seen that one. Edit: found it, it's probably the second chance pool: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#second-chance-pool https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#second...
someguydave 6y ago
I suspect this post was promoted via a voting ring.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 6y ago
  I looked at the data and that's not likely. The early upvoters were all well-established, legit users with no obvious connection between them.

dmak 6y ago

I skimmed the article, but I would argue product focused has to understand everything including being “market-focused”. You need to understand what the market is asking to guide your product decisions.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

Related to this article, I work at Shopify and they have 3 rules which are loosely as follows: 1) Build a great product 2) Make money 3) 1 always comes before 2

arkitaip 6y ago
I can't think of a single company that would advocate anything else and yet all of them prioritize money over product, even if it means enacting petty user-hostile policies.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  When you're large enough growth slows down so you make more money by building a moat and squeezing your customers. When you're still growing quickly a good product and the resulting growth leads to more revenue.
- weeboid 6y ago
  Ahh, you are mistaking Great Product™ (performs in the market) for great product (genuinely moves humanity forward)
dnndev 6y ago
Most companies have a list like this and other values they claim but rarely follow. In all large companies at one point the stars aligned and you had smart, connected devs and sales people that made a great product, executed and sold. This fades after a while, you get academics and newbies that derail and complicated a good thing. I have seen it over and over again. Hulu is a good example, started out very strong and slowly became a terrible product. Til this I dont understand the UI.

sophrocyne 6y ago

If this is your definition of “product-led”, you have a bad Product team. The Product teams job is to make sure that you aren’t relying on the “if you build it they will come” approach to product development. One of the only real arguments against product-led, as I see it, is when the quality of the product is less correlated with success (e.g., low competition markets with long contracts), and I’d still argue against it. Who wants to build a business strategy around products that don’t fit a market need? Yes, Product needs to work with Sales and Marketing to determine whether something is valuable to the customer and viable for the business. No, Sales teams are not the best decision-maker for “what should we build next”. Before reading his bio, I’d have thought the author had only a cursory understanding of real product management. Given his background, I’m more inclined to believe this is click-bait.

dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
How would you define product-led? Or can you link to some examples? Thank you!
- kyriee 6y ago
  Product-led typically means "driven by customer needs" but also being able to make the correct trade-offs vis a vis engineering and sales considerations. That is, delivering something that is in line with what you can build and not delivering "value" that the customer is not ready to pay for. Which can be opposed to "sales driven" where the sales team sold something, engineering has to play catch up, which can lead to technical debt and lack of focus mid-term. Or engineering led, where the engineering team will decide priorities and might push cool tech demos that will never become successful products. Google being the best example of this type of culture. Edit: article is terrible. He creates strawmans to sell his wares. As always, beware of consultant blogs.
  - Closi 6y ago
    You are describing customer-led IMO. Product led is about building the best product, with the “best” taking into account customer wants. But product is just one dimension of customer needs, and customer needs are fulfilled across all other departments either directly or indirectly. A sales-led company can still be driven by customer needs, so the definition is way too broad. Also the statement that “product led” means “making the correct trade off between sales/engineering” is too broad. You could just as easily say “sales/engineering led” means “having the correct mix of product”.

HugoDaniel 6y ago

meh, a not-so-kind but equally apt critic can also be made for the case that the article is trying to promote, the so called "market-driven" companies. most edge funds companies can be considered almost 100% market driven...

rancar2 6y ago

The historical reasons for sales-driven and product-led was due to internal politics. As noted in the article, these are internally focused, as most employees work “in” the business and not “on” the business. I would recommend using different wording than the article, as Market-Focused will lead to focus on competitors. This is again leads to focus on the wrong party, not the right party and the reason why the organization should exist and consume resources including people’s/employees’ time. Mission-driven in both for-profit and non-profit context works very well to focus the team on the right party (customer, patients, citizens, large enterprises in insurance, the local environment, etc. “target population”) as the organization scales to provide value to the target population. A shared mission to ensure the fulfillment of the primary reason for the existence will ensure the team focuses on delivery of value to the right party, target population. However, the mission needs to provide enough value to justify its existence, and with three parts: (1) large value proposition, (2) large target population and (3) large unmet need, then you have a justification for the continued existence of the organization and the resources it consumes.

jka 6y ago
Agree broadly with what you're saying; having a common mission is a good way to align on goals within a company and also with customers and community. It's debatable, but the phrase "target population" seems potentially non-ideal from a cultural perspective. To me that has some negative connotations, implying that the recipients might not be aware/participating/accepting. It feels like companies should want to support and encourage their audience, as opposed to pushing things onto them. Perhaps a minor point, but I think that if you develop a large organizational culture which begins to repeat various phrases or terms, then those words and the way they are perceived become significant (in proportion to the company's influence).
- rancar2 6y ago
  I fully agree that “target population” isn’t the best wording. If you have a suggestion of another phrase in English that would be readily understood without further definition, please do share as I would love to find a better phrase than target population. I typically use just “target” but I was avoiding being ambiguous while attempting to be brief. Again, “target” also carries a lot of cultural baggage for its military associations. To go a bit deeper, underneath my comment is method of accomplishing a mission through organizational/program design, where a mission consists of: verb. target. outcome. measurement. * To maintain brevity in the above format, the “need” and the “how” may be implied in the mission statement but are typically not well covered by the above suggested mission statement format, but should be codified in a logical model of the programs/executable units of work. Examples of missions: 1. Living Goods = save. african kids’. lives. reducing child mortality. 2. One Arce Fund = get. african families. out of extreme poverty. increasing income. 3. Island Conservation = save. island species. from extinction. recovering species populations living. Definitions: 1.Verb = The measurable action of the program taking place on the target to achieve the outcome. 2. Target = The person/place/thing that is the served by the program. 3. Outcome = The measurable benefit that is expected for the target. 4. Measurement = The primary set of data being collected as an indication that the outcome is being achieved. Edit: formatting adjustments

weeboid 6y ago

Ha, I got past the sales-driven company caricature, into the product led, and thought: "Well, like many things, it depends. "Which blend best suits the market?" Market driven companies, ta-da! Lol

whack 6y ago

From what I've skimmed, the author blames sales-focused companies for being too obsessed with capturing value. And this is a bad thing. He also blames product-focused companies for being too obsessed with delivering value. And this is a bad thing. His silver bullet at the end seems to be that the company should be marked-focused. Which appears to be shorthand for both delivering value and capturing value. Ie, being sales-focused or product-focused is bad. Instead, you should strive to be BOTH! It seems analogous to me telling NFL coaches that being defense-focused is bad because they won't score very many points. And being offense-focused is also bad, because they will give up too many points. Instead, they should focus on BOTH! Maybe I'm being naive, but this seems a tad obvious, and not all that useful.

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spzb 6y ago
That was my takeaway too so if you're naive, you're not alone.
- crmd 6y ago
  What’s funny is that bullshit factories like McKinsey and BCG convert shallow insights such as this into billion dollar pipelines. You could turn this blog post into a PowerPoint presentation, and corporate boards will happily pay you $250k a pop to interview people and diagnose their company as too sales or product driven, with the recommendation to become market driven. Even the football offense/defense thing, delivered verbally during the board presentation, will be met with deep nods of understanding and help energize the room and make you look like a rockstar. Some of the board members will literally be thinking, “we need a CEO like this guy”. Once their check clears, you give the same analysis to the next company down the road for another $250k.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
    Even if it's the placebo effect, if McKinsey can make organizations operate more effectively with pre-fab slide decks, then it's worth it. They are providing value to the organization.

zerotolerance 6y ago

My experience with “sales-driven” is sales people selling things that don’t exist, ill-defined, and delivery dates that are demand based. This leads to all corners cut, products that can only be sold once. In other words, sales-driven companies are a way to turn your company into a consultancy.

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indymike 6y ago

How about option D: Balance. Sales, marketing, product (and the g&a team) are all crucial to success. The market, sales, and product all can be signals... But without balance the biggest opportunities and dangers will be missed.

neom 6y ago
That's exactly right Indymike. Business should be vision and mission lead. If people have an understanding of the CHANGE they want to capture in the world (either by creating it or taking advantages of it), a good leadership will know when to pull on the levers inside the company of the business at the right time to complete a mission on a step towards the vision. Sometimes that's leaning into sales, sometimes it's leaning into product, sometimes it's leaning into technology, sometimes it's playing them all together. Business is more art than science, and the startup trope should be "I'm going to capitalize on change" not "I'm going to change the world".

Closi 6y ago

I think the biggest issue with the “product-led” mindset is the one dimensionality of it. You need the right balance of everything in reality, including sales, and the mix is different for different companies.

stephc_int13 6y ago

There is not a single general purpose recipe to do business. My advice would be to understand and focus on your strengths, and to avoid cargo-cults. And yes, alignment in any company or team is extremely important, this is what leadership is for.

0xbadcafebee 6y ago

Ultimately these are just generalizations. Your company can be focused on both and regularly fail to execute either. What the execs know is that all they need to do is generate profits. There are many tricks you can use to do that, even if you have shitty product that customers don't like. This is where established behemoths sometimes end up, to the point that people hate their brand, but use it anyway. At that point the customer is just poultry, and the company's focus becomes keeping foxes out of the hen house.

jdauriemma 6y ago

Did anyone else immediately think of “The Conjoined Triangles of Success?”

TulliusCicero 6y ago
Yeah, the chart gives off that vibe 100%: https://itamargilad.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Yin-Yang-Final-1-scaled.jpg https://itamargilad.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Yin-Yang-...

nbzso 6y ago

One question? What we have to do when the market is not yet created? May be the author ignores the idea of iPhone? Can you imagine Jobs to be "market focused"? When there is no market for touch based phones? Market focused by the way perfectly describes Apple of today. The Irony is big.

hacknews20 6y ago

Just be customer led. Stop making it blah.

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a4isms 6y ago

Most essays like this begin by pointing out that a company that over-focuses on X is headed for trouble, for almost any value of X. They then present Y, which if properly pursued, will solve the problem of X. Both sides of this argument are subject to “No True Scotsman” problems. By definition, over-focusing on X is going to be problematic, that’s tautological. But what about companies that are giving X the right amount of focus? Likewise, of course if you’re doing X badly and then you change to doing Y “right,” things will get better. But how much of that is X vs Y, and how much is magically going from doing something wrong to doing something right? The essay pitches some education on how to do “market-focused” right. Fair enough, let’s grant that in the hands of the well-intentioned, doing market-focused right will lead to success. Ok, but will taking a similar approach to fixing sales-focused also help? Is the assumption that sales-focused cannot be done right under any circumstances? I’m not sure the essay establishes this. Same for product-led growth (“PLG”), the current hotness in product management thanks in large part to Amazon’s success. Ok, if PLG done wrong is bad, can we fix PLG and do it right? So my first observation is that the argument “Doing X badly is worse than doing Y correctly, so do Y correctly” neglects scenarios where we fix X. Is that an option as well? — My second observation is the dual of the above. What makes us think we can do Y correctly? Now don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting the author’s educational offering is suspect. Come to your own conclusion about this, just like evaluating any vendor of a silver bullet. I’m suggesting something else: For those companies doing sales-led or product-led badly, what if the problem is the company and its leadership, not the methodology? In that case, you have to fix the company and its leadership, or they’ll bring their problems with them to “market-led growth.” I think of this second scenario often. Consider the time when companies were transitioning from shipping software on media to SaaS. Continuous integration and other practices transformed the very notion of “shipping,” and solved many problems companies had with death marches to press golden masters. Shipping software on media was X, SaaS was Y. Many companies benefited greatly from the shift. But they were usually companies that were already doing reasonably well with shipping software on media. If a company was good at shipping software on media, switching to SaaS was a shock, but it removed the limitations imposed by physical media and distribution. But if a company had trouble shipping quality software to plan with physical media, it didn’t magically become good at shipping quality software incrementally with SaaS. SaaS did not fix problems with engineering culture or leadership. — p.s. None of the above applies for much of HN’s demographic: If you’re starting from scratch, you don’t have a “Doing X badly” problem to begin with. You can sit down and evaluate sales-led versus product-led versus market-focus purely on their individual merits. This is one of the great advantages of starting from scratch. But even if you don’t have a “Doing X badly” problem, be careful with arguments that contrast “Doing X badly” with “Doing Y right.” A balanced approach to choosing X versus Y would be to compare doing X right with doing Y right, and also to think about whether X or Y is going to be easier to do right for you in your situation.

polote 6y ago

The beginning of the article is pretty on point. Most PM dream about working in a pure product-led company and spend their time complaining that it is not how things should be done. Which is a big misunderstanding of the PM job, I've written before how to navigate the PM in role in Saas enterprise (very likely sales driven) [1] Actually if you search the web for PM resources you will mostly find insights on how to run in a product-led environment. Which is funny because most of companies are not operating that way. It is even more funny because it is easier to fail a product-led company than a sales driven one The rest of the article is bullshit to enroll people for his workshops. There is no better gurus than ones who invent terms who don't exist and then spend their time explaining how genius it is. A market-focused seems to be the kind of companies that someone who has never run a company would imagine. Wins on all markets, but also on the product and the sales. And we all know that this is impossible [1] https://blog.luap.info/product-management-in-saas-b2b-enterprise-is-easy.html https://blog.luap.info/product-management-in-saas-b2b-enterp...

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dasil003 6y ago

This is not Sales vs Product. This is bad product management, full stop. It is not sales’ responsibility to define the product, it is product’s responsibility to do that, taking into account sales requests, market analysis, executive vision, user feedback and engineering feasibility. In any given situation it takes a lot of expertise and judgement (and often luck!) to know where they need to be focused. Trying to reduce actual product problems to some simple knob between caricatured role definitions will help no one except management consultants. In reality product management failure is very contextual to the problem at hand-—details matter.

k__ 6y ago

The problem I saw most of the time was devs simply see value differently or ignore it completely. In the best case they think about solving a user problem as directly as possible. I the worst case they just want to apply a technology or paradigm as correctly as possible, and everyone has their own opinion on how this is done. But successful software is a non-trivial function of solving a users problem and extracting the most money with that solution from the market. That and privacy, security, performance, usability, etc. pp. Nobody cares how your solution is a perfect application for K8s. If they can't find it because of non-existing marketing, it won't work. If you can't make money to support it's maintenance, it won't work.

golemotron 6y ago

Leader-Led is better and it solves both problems.

simon_kun 6y ago

How mission driven teams at FAANG build $1Tn+ market cap: 1. Product teams create utility at ~zero marginal cost per additional user 2. Platform teams drive distribution 3. Monetization teams convert utility to cash 4. GOTO 1

thewarrior 6y ago
Never heard it put so succinctly. This should be higher up.
polote 6y ago
- Facebook: Yeah more or less that - Apple: far from zero marginal cost per additional user - Amazon: far from zero marginal cost per additional user - Netflix : More or less works, if driven by the content they create. But not a product - Google: Has monopoly on Ads search, all others projects bring close to nothing Except Facebook, I don't see how 'zero marginal cost per additional user'-products have any impact of the revenue these company make
rajacombinator 6y ago
How it really works, even (especially) at FAANG: 1. Get one thing right. 2. Sit back and make my monies.

xyzzy21 6y ago

There's a 3rd axis missing - Customer Centered which can and should drive both Product-led and Sales-driven. Both Product-led and Sales-driven alone are putting the cart before the horse. The horse is the customer first. When you do it right, you get all three! When you simply use a recipe book of heuristics without understanding anything about economics (btw a university Economics course teaches you next to NOTHING) and your particular market, then you are practicing Cargo-Cult Superstition business. You might as well strangle chickens and wave the entrails over your lobby door for all the good it will do you!

yowlingcat 6y ago
You hit the nail on the head. Talking to the customer in some way shape or form should be the first step that informs whether you take a more product or sales led approach and more importantly /why/. Without a customer centric approach, all you end up with is (as you point out) a solution in search of a problem -- a poor place to be.

crsv 6y ago

The introduction of the idea of a "Market-focused" company is so trivial and unimaginative here that I can't think for a second anyone worth their salt as an operator would do much more than roll their eyes. This kind of content that creates these sort of false dichotomies that capture some bad aspects of poor business strategy and then present some idea where you correct these wrongs as novel is just so... brutally uninteresting. The fact that this stuff floats to the top of HN as become as unsurprising as it is disappointing. Some "bad thing bad" title that people don't even bother reading gets pumped up, and then when you take a moment to dig in and digest the content, it's a whole bunch of nothin'.

KingOfCoders 6y ago

Once in my live I would love to work at a tech driven company.

the_only_law 6y ago
Same, but for some reason it’s rare for me to get interviews at the type of places.

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stedman 6y ago

Great clickbait, awful content Formula: 1. set up strawmen on either extreme 2. argue for the middle Being sales-led vs product-led is not about your specifying your "company DNA". It's about choosing the go-to-market strategy that maximizes your LTV:CAC. And as the market changes, so too can your GTM strategy. As evidence: HubSpot successfully transitioned their GTM from sales- to product-led. OpenViewVenture published a guide explaining it: https://openviewpartners.com/blog/hubspots-5-strategies-for-transitioning-to-a-product-led-organization/ https://openviewpartners.com/blog/hubspots-5-strategies-for-...

RocketSyntax 6y ago

Product is already market-focused. As a career product manager that has also worked as a software engineer and a salesman - I find your article offensive and polarizing.

for_i_in_range 6y ago

tl;dr: be a Consumer-Driven company.

rushabh 6y ago

Both paths, sales or product (or market) can lead to success. The key is always execution.

mwcampbell 6y ago

When reading the caricature of a product-focused company, I couldn't help but think of NeXT. NeXT was before my time (I was about 8 when the first NeXT computer came out, and completely unaware of what they did until decades later), but I've read about them and watched their first launch event [1]. It's obvious from that presentation that they were state-of-the-art, way ahead of their time. But from what I've read, NeXT computers didn't sell very well. I'd be interested in any detailed postmortem of NeXT's failures. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92NNyd3m79I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92NNyd3m79I

dragonwriter 6y ago
The impression I got at the time was that NeXT was selling a fairly high-end Unix workstation with features that made it a better desktop PC than contemporary workstations, but lacked the enterprise sales experience to hit most of the Unix workstation market (which also had considerable vendor lock-in, so it was hard to get people to switch) while having a price point that, despite the features, made it a very hard sell as a PC replacement. The nonstandard storage on the original NeXT probably didn’t help, but that waa addressed quickly with the second generation machines which had more traditional storage.

motohagiography 6y ago

X-driven company is really a recruiting message, it's not a strategy. The only thing that drives a company is its growth stage. tech + team = investment driven idea + team = investment driven investment + team = product driven revenue + product = sales driven investment + product = engineering driven revenue - product = acquisition driven A product is something someone both wants and pays for, otherwise it's just a technology. Might build this out, but it's pretty consistent. IMO, etc...

xbar 6y ago

"The beating heart of the company is its product teams, full of rockstar developers, designers and PMs, and rich in methodology and “culture”. But these folks are compelled to follow the grand vision of management, which leads to convoluted product extravaganzas that don’t blow anyone away." Garbage opinion piece.

fukmbas 6y ago

Product led is just an excuse for MBA types to insert themselves into IT departments and leech high paying salaries.