How do I protect our product strategy from sales pushback? Our sales team doesn’t focus, and is trying to make our product easy to sell to anyone, rather that our target market.

This is a tale as old as time. There are many ways to approach this. I have seen vendors heavily bid on the AdWords of their competitor names and promote alternative solutions (trials or marketing content). I have seen vendors who are challengers in mature markets create "Us vs. Them" web pages or blogs that outline the differences (according to the vendor publishing the info) what the major differences are. And, I have seen third-party research or analyst evaluations heavily promoted that rank vendors according to specific criteria (contracted by the vendor or annually conducted created...more

Love this question as well, and I'll approach it from a couple different perspectives. First, I'd acknowledge that some markets are so big or fast growing that multiple amazingly successful winners can emerge. As of today, Apple is worth $2.8T and Microsoft is worth $2.25T. While I'm sure both companies wouldn't mind adding their other's market share to their portfolio, I also think any reasonable person would consider both outcomes desireable. This example is not to say there's not need to play defense if a market is large or fast growing enough. Quite the opposite, both companies needed ...more

A common mistake exec teams make is focusing on output and forgetting about outcomes. Product teams present roadmaps to execs and once they’ve shipped a thing, they tell them it’s complete and move onto the next. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what’s on your roadmap or what you’ve successfully shipped if you’re not moving the needle in the outcomes you care about. Questions to align on with your team to help you get there: 1. Do we have clearly defined desired outcomes for your team? 2. Do we have alignment on these outcomes with leadership / execs? 3. Do we have a way to ...more

* For any Product, the hierarcy, in terms of immediate to long-term is Execute -> Features -> Roadmap -> Strategy -> Vision * The focus for any product team should be to execute & launch and then working on the features & building on the roadmap from a bottoms-up perspective. They should also embark on a top-down appraoch of understanding the market landscape, the user problems they can solve profitably and setting the vision. The intersection of these approaches can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to a few years and depends on the stage of the firm, th...more

Pretty much the same stencil that I used to answer the previous question. If you are pivoting, I'd assume that one or more of these elements below have changed. So I'd use this framework to re-examine the sweet spot that you need to land on to be effective and win this next time around. Some elements to consider - 1. Market - Market landscape, gaps, and market opportunities. You want to work on an impactful problem area. Key Geos you will play in. etc. 2. Key vectors - I also like to play at the intersection of 2-3 key growth vectors - so I know directionally I am betting in the righ...more