I recently took a VP of Product role at a pre-series A startup. We have product market fit and are scaling. However, there is vast amounts of technical debt. The founder inisits that we should be producing lots of new features because our users are “feature whores.” I belive we should focus on perfecting the UX on existing features, and get technical debt to a controlable amount. Am I wrong? Should we focus on being a feature factory or should we perfect our existing feature set?
Strike a balance. That’s why you’re there as a VP, not an yes man to the founder
a* yes man
An ass-man
Just read what you typed, it has no mention of the goal for the company at all. What is the long term and short term goals? Do you meet a certain number / metric to get funded or unlock next traunch of financing? If you’re dead without money it clearly doesn’t mean shit if you have the most beautiful code base. It is not uncommon to nuke the whole codebase after you get a large funding round. Especially if it is required for you to scale. Again. Go back to your road map. Prioritize what’s important.
Also. Do you actually have product market fit? If yes, then you should be expecting a decent financing round soon. This should have a large impact on your road map. https://youtu.be/FBOLk9s9Ci4
^ This guy knows what's up
Depends on stage, initially you have to create as many as features first to attract customers.After acquiring enough customers, the earlier you deal with techincal debt, the longer your company can sustain.
Yes and No. Of course you continue building what your customers want. And you also pick up some of the technical debt features/bugs along the way. Not all technical debt is created equal. Any technical debt that would impact growth in the near term (based on a time or customer kpi continuum) must be addressed to continue growth. As a product manager in these situations, I would address prioritization at the individual feature/bug level, not at the conceptual tech debt vs. new features level. You need to do the analysis of what that means. Another role you must do well is actually size up the level of investment needed so when the founder goes around raising it, he has a realistic sense of what is needed and not just a guess (too much is dilutive, too little makes prioritization too hard and puts growth in jeopardy). When you do that make sure to not forget about the tech debt.
Deliver value first, always. There are good processes and frameworks to quant, articulate, and score value. If you're not measuring your efforts by their quant'ed value, and driving all decisions by being data-informed, then you have much bigger problems than tech debt.
If you truly have product market fit you'd know where to focus on. Find out what brings users to your product and what keeps them coming back. You don't need to build new features to attract more of the same type of user. They're using it cos they see value.. Just improve UX for existing features to help new or old users get that value sooner/consistently. Keep repeating this to scale your product to multiple regions to acquire similar users. Only build new features to attract users who're looking for something else.
If you don't have product market fit, keep building newer features till you have something that users find of value and keep coming back. Your growth curve when you have product market fit would be very evident.. Users ideally start bringing other users to use your product.
Speak with the customers and gather data. In my experience founders go by intuition a lot, product people lead with data. You’re there to strike the balance
Yes you are wrong, rule 1 is do what the customers want. It's easy to want to do things right but sadly there is no end to that battle and you would eventually lose fighting it. PS: If you have to ask such questions on Blind, do you think you are the right person for the job?
Curious. What is your title and background?
Soft developer in a startupish company. Have had 2 of my own startups fail in the past.