4 ms·

Lots of really good points in here. I have worked at various companies who have struggled after the initial growth. Hubris can take over and we feel the need to

Lots of really good points in here. I have worked at various companies who have struggled after the initial growth. Hubris can take over and we feel the need to over-extend, to sit at the big-boys table, to court the corporates with their fat (but very tight) wallets. I think a common cause is simply fear. There is a lot at stake when you have 50+ employees. Maybe those one or two markets are not big enough to support what we need any more so instead of razor focus and discipline which helps, we try and build everything for everyone and a lot of it is simply wasted effort. We also start having teams so instead of a design decision being taken by the entire management (and can get shouted down), it just gets done because "the design team" regardless of the value it is actually adding or not. In extremis, we see the FANG companies who have so many engineering staff, we can only hypothesize about what most of these people even do for 40 hours per week on massive salaries.

bombcar 4y ago
I wonder how much lost productivity comes from people saying "if only it had feature X" to salesmen to be polite instead of a simple "we're not interested and won't be buying".
- goopthink 4y ago
  "The Mom Test" is an awesome look at that -- how bad questions and worse feedback leads to a lot of wasted effort. Highly recommend it. http://momtestbook.com/ http://momtestbook.com/
- mason55 4y ago
  It's the difference between being a feature factory and having a real product strategy. If you actually have some kind of customer in mind, and you have ideas of problems that you're solving for them, then this can be valuable feedback even if it's a lie. Digging into the feature might expose you to a new customer problem that weren't aware of. You can talk to other customers and prospects and understand if this is a problem they have as well. You can take that information and extrapolate it into a real set of use cases, think about the size of the market of "customers who have this problem," and decide if it's something that makes sense to tackle with your product. Then you can design features to solve the real problem. If you just have a feature factory then all you'll do is build the feature as the prospect specified. You'll go back, they'll still say no, and now you have no idea how to market this feature or if it would even be useful for anyone else or it's just built around the customer's internal process.
goopthink 4y ago
OP here -- something I didn't touch on is that this is really common when a company transitions from early-stage to mid stage. The operations of a small company and the operations of a mid size company (and the operations of a large company) are completely different. The problems start to happen there is a mismatch between what you are and what you think you are. If you implement big-company practices for a small startup, you're often going to be overburdening the team and losing agility. When you are a med/large company but operating like a small company, you'll see chaos and inefficiency. Part of the problem is that there's no clear line. Observant engineering and product leaders tend to have an intuition for when practices need to change... I think team size and revenue/contract size (for B2B) are good heuristics. But more often than not, it's a stumble through the transition and folks feel the pain before figuring out the solution.
- dcow 4y ago
  > Part of the problem is that there's no clear line. This is what baffles/wonders me about the state of the art in building companies. It seems so anecdotal and ad-hoc. Case studies and good advice, while they exist, are from "previous generations" and "we do it differently" because "culture". It feels like society has to continuously reinvent solutions to managing people and projects rather than building upon proven and effective strategies. I guess, perhaps, I am betraying my own lack of knowledge of this domain. Maybe there are tried and true tactics and I've just never experienced them. Related, it really feels like there should be a sub-field of "sociology" set on improving the efficiency of groups of humans using objective methodology that yields consistent and reliable results...
  - sumanthvepa 4y ago
    > it feels like there should be a sub-field of “sociology” set on improving the efficiency groups of humans Yes there is. Its called organisational behaviour. Most b-schools have some faculty specialising in it. Cornell,I think, has a whole department in the school of Industrial and Labor Relations. They’re pretty good.
  - danielmarkbruce 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago

I wonder how much lost productivity comes from people saying "if only it had feature X" to salesmen to be polite instead of a simple "we're not interested and won't be buying".

goopthink 4y ago
"The Mom Test" is an awesome look at that -- how bad questions and worse feedback leads to a lot of wasted effort. Highly recommend it. http://momtestbook.com/ http://momtestbook.com/
mason55 4y ago
It's the difference between being a feature factory and having a real product strategy. If you actually have some kind of customer in mind, and you have ideas of problems that you're solving for them, then this can be valuable feedback even if it's a lie. Digging into the feature might expose you to a new customer problem that weren't aware of. You can talk to other customers and prospects and understand if this is a problem they have as well. You can take that information and extrapolate it into a real set of use cases, think about the size of the market of "customers who have this problem," and decide if it's something that makes sense to tackle with your product. Then you can design features to solve the real problem. If you just have a feature factory then all you'll do is build the feature as the prospect specified. You'll go back, they'll still say no, and now you have no idea how to market this feature or if it would even be useful for anyone else or it's just built around the customer's internal process.

goopthink 4y ago

OP here -- something I didn't touch on is that this is really common when a company transitions from early-stage to mid stage. The operations of a small company and the operations of a mid size company (and the operations of a large company) are completely different. The problems start to happen there is a mismatch between what you are and what you think you are. If you implement big-company practices for a small startup, you're often going to be overburdening the team and losing agility. When you are a med/large company but operating like a small company, you'll see chaos and inefficiency. Part of the problem is that there's no clear line. Observant engineering and product leaders tend to have an intuition for when practices need to change... I think team size and revenue/contract size (for B2B) are good heuristics. But more often than not, it's a stumble through the transition and folks feel the pain before figuring out the solution.

dcow 4y ago
> Part of the problem is that there's no clear line. This is what baffles/wonders me about the state of the art in building companies. It seems so anecdotal and ad-hoc. Case studies and good advice, while they exist, are from "previous generations" and "we do it differently" because "culture". It feels like society has to continuously reinvent solutions to managing people and projects rather than building upon proven and effective strategies. I guess, perhaps, I am betraying my own lack of knowledge of this domain. Maybe there are tried and true tactics and I've just never experienced them. Related, it really feels like there should be a sub-field of "sociology" set on improving the efficiency of groups of humans using objective methodology that yields consistent and reliable results...
- sumanthvepa 4y ago
  > it feels like there should be a sub-field of “sociology” set on improving the efficiency groups of humans Yes there is. Its called organisational behaviour. Most b-schools have some faculty specialising in it. Cornell,I think, has a whole department in the school of Industrial and Labor Relations. They’re pretty good.
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago