Product Development Philosophy
A few topics are interesting to reflect on.
- Sales-driven org vs engineering-driven org.
- focus vs innovation, i.e. top-down vs bottome-up product development
- sell what we build vs build what we can sell.
I am biased. I am in the engineering org and would enjoy more if engineering decides what to build. We don’t want to simply follow what Sales ask us to build because that is what they can sell. If they had asked, we may focus on features only. There won’t be our platform. That is what Brent brought in, with Henning’s help. There is no right or wrong. It is what one prefers and believes in. Engineers are amazing inventors and creative thinkers. For innovations to happen, you need to have creativity. You can’t build products based on what customers want. That makes a company reactive. On the flip side, how do engineers know what to build? Engineers need to get the data, need to learn about the domain, and talk to customers. Engineers need to have customer empathy. That is what Amazon does right. Everybody should have customer empathy — understanding the problems.
Now PM’s role. Our PM was against MAP recurring with the argument that we need to know the major theme before we are building things. We should stay focused instead of building random new features that we have to maintain. I am pushing for a beta that serves as a discovery tool. This is the bottom-up approach. I am sure if we solve real problems, the sales team can sell. It is like the factories in China pivoted to manufacturing masks, though those were not their thing. Going extreme, if zuora can solve the EPR problems better, sure, why not. Again, like startups, it is about solving problems. Nobody is waiting to death until their original vision comes true. What if it was wrong from the beginning. There are exceptions, but I’d rather iterate. True also, we had so many initiatives ongoing, and got us spread too thin. We never did the prioritization right. Mu had his priority — fixing rev pro, fixing order, etc. It was as an organization, we didn’t do a good job together.
Finally, tech debt vs new features. I feel we want to build more features. We still have no product-market fit yet. No value. We can build the best software out there, but until adoption, we are a cost center. Do I believe in MAP recurring? With reasonable convictions, yes. But the key also is to iterate. I never wanted that to be a blocker
