AMA: Dovetail Product, Srinivas Krishnamurti on Product Strategy

New ideas can come from anywhere and I would contend that you want to create an org culture where this is true. Your sales team has daily conversations with prospects and depending on why you win/lose, you may get requests/ideas for new features to win more. Similarly, your CS team has daily conversations with your existing customers and depending on how your customers are using your product, you may get requests/ideas for new features to either drive expansion or reduce churn. Sometimes your pr ...Read More

I would contend that this starts with getting your exec team involved early in the strategy discussions so they have an opportunity to have their say and put some skin in the game. When the strategy is finally documented, it won't be your strategy but the collective effort of the leadership team and it should never be a surprise to anyone on the leadership team. Broadly speaking, people tend to get on board with stuff they worked on so you want to engage the leadership team (individually, initia ...Read More

I would encourage you to refrain from overly focusing on your competitors. You can drive yourself and your team crazy tracking all the new features your competitors are shipping but that doesn't mean you ignore them either. I will give you one example from my startup journey. We had a few competitors with one that we saw in most deals. We won our fair share as they did too but they started winning more when they shipped a new feature and this went on for a few months. We looked at the new featur ...Read More

There are many stakeholders that need to buy-in to your strategy - your exec team, your cross-functional peers, your cross-functional product teams and just as importantly, your GTM teams - mktg, sales, CS. I would also contend that getting initial buy-in is half the problem and but keeping the strategy front and center in day-to-day decisions is extremely hard and this is where more companies go wrong. They spend the time to develop the strategy, get buy-in, etc. but don't spend the time consta ...Read More

The balance changes based on the context of the business so as a first step, product leaders need to be fully in-tune with the business. For example, if churn is high, you should invest more to fix the leaky bucket. Similarly, if churn is low, you should invest more in building differentiators and innovating to create better moats. I've used the 30-30-30 rule as a starting point: 30% of your investment towards driving growth, 30% towards keeping customers happy and 30% towards debt, whether it b ...Read More