AMA: EzCater Director of Product, Delivery & Customer Success, Brandon Green on Building 0-1 Products

"0-1 product development" is the idea of building something from nothing. That is, you have an abstract customer or business problem you need to solve and no solution for it (0) and, as a PM, you need to figure out the first attempt at a solution (1) to address the problem. An example from my own career is Notebooks, a product I helped ship at Abstract - we had a meaningful number of customers abandoning our initial offering due to changes in the product design tooling landscape, and we needed t ...Read More

This is hard! For me, it's a mix of having a good understanding and confidence that you have  (1) a clear hypothesis that you can test with a minimally viable product that is shaped by data and customer/market research, (2) confidence that you have a potential solution that can prove the hypothesis correct, and (3) an understanding of the risk and opportunity for building that solution, including the time it'll take to build, the availability of users willing to try your solution. When in doubt, ...Read More

So, in my experience of building 0-to-1, I've never had to do this before exploring a potential new product 😅 and candidly, I really don't like doing it because any projections are in my experience educated guesses based on inherently flawed source data - historical data that may not apply anymore, all sorts of biases, differences between other products and your new product, etc. What I try to do instead of offering revenue projections is work with my leadership/stakeholders/et al to understand ...Read More

I don't think I have a great answer for this; I think there are a few possible points to consider though, and I think it ultimately comes down to how you understand the user/market problem your company is positioned to solve with its product(s). Is that problem best solved by a single product, or does a group of products better address the problem or need? If so, how and why? Is your product not serving the needs of your customers, and if not, why? Does the product have meaningful shortcomings a ...Read More

I think the two most common mistakes in building 0-to-1 products are: Not acknowledging or checking some assumptions about the problem your product is meant to solve Over-investing in the first iteration of that product (the MVP) without having proven out the riskiest of your assumptions Under-investing in product market research (specifically the other products in the problem space and their strengths/weaknesses) I see a lot of PMs attempt to build things that are bigger and more complicated th ...Read More

Not at all - it just changes how I think about product delivery and the tools my teams and I use. In the office, it was common to rally a bunch of teammates together in a "war room"-like setting, heads behind laptops and quickly bouncing status updates or ideas or urgent issues around to move a product forward. Now, we do that over Slack and/or Zoom.  The main opportunity remote work has brought is a critical need for documentation - that is, an easily interpretable and navigable paper trail for ...Read More

I think the quote has validity in some contexts and less in others. If you are building a 0-to-1 product in a company where the culture is anxious about, say, the brand impression your "embarrassing MVP" may invoke, that may be a fear you need to help alleviate as a PM. However, there are other contexts (eg. in financial products, healthcare tech, fortune-100 enterprise products) where an "embarrassing" MVP may actually compromise your ability to successfully validate the hypothesis of your MVP; ...Read More