One of the most important thing all the new product entrepreneurs have to figure out as part of their Business Plan is what is going to be their go-to-market strategy atleast from Product or Services Delivery perspective. This is especially true for an organization which is starting up. As critical as it is for almost all the startups, I see that many startups make the mistake of planning their go-to-market strategy using engineering milestones and not customer-driven milestones - especially in products which are more customer driven.
To explain my point here, let me take an example of two hypothetical Startups - A and B (assume that they are building same type of product).
- Startup A sets its first milestone to roll out a Beta Release. So they plan a list of features to be implemented in Beta and drive their product engineering. The goal or purpose behind the Beta Release is somehow implicit here.
- Startup B sets its first milestone to get 100 users start using their system. So in this case they drive their plan for Beta Release with the bare minimum features which will reach them to their goal. In some cases, these minimum features might be same as the features which Startup A is implementing. However, the point here is that purpose of the milestone is well defined in B’s case as compared to Startup A.
IMO, from the above example Startup B is in a much flexible situation where they can maneuver their engineering close to what customers or potential customers are expecting. They are customer driven. Also, there is also an implicit requirement on Startup B to be more Agile to reach the goal. Startup A’s strategy is more Engineering driven which may or may not be the same as Customer driven focus.While I am personally in favor of following Startup B’s approach, I will also agree that organization’s circumstances to select either of the approaches may be driven by more wider range of issues.
From my experience, I have also learnt that Product Developers are more motivated and aligned when B’s approach is taken. They are more mission oriented. Whereas in A’s case, I have seen that the aim is more timeline oriented.
I would love to hear your thoughts/comments/feedback.
(Note: This blog is a re-print of what I had posted on my personal blog)
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November 24th, 2008 at 5:57 am
In my experience, any of the approaches, taken independently would not produce the kind of results that a balanced approach (combining both of your approaches) would produce.
People facing customers should come up with a plan which is driven by customer requirements and technical people (after taking inputs on customer requirements) should come up with a engineering driven plan. The importance of engineering driven plan in most of the cases is due to the fact that assessment of technology to be used, license costs involved, time to market can be done only with an engineering driven plan.
A customer needs driven plan helps in deciding the goals development team should achieve, where as the engineering driven plan helps in deciding the route the development team should take to achieve those goals. And hence, I feel that, for every project, irrespective of size or domain or anything, both the approaches should go hand in hand.
November 30th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Suhas,
Thank you for your thoughts.
I agree with you that both the approaches should go hand-in-hand. However, my proposition in the above post was that the starting point of the thought process to determine the plan for the product release should be driven by the end-user’s needs. If you start with this, this would result in a more effective Engineering Plan as stated in Plan A.
Thanks
Manish