I subscribe to the Ried Hoffman quote - “If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late.” How do you actually live this out in a larger company where there is internal anxiety?

So much about product management is about stakeholder management — getting everyone from engineers to exec team aligned on 1) what you are building and 2) what the goal is. With goals, we're very good at getting folks excited about the metrics-based goals ("we'll move conversion rate by 2 percent" or "sessions per month will increase by 10%") but I've found that it can be super helpful to align on what the goal is of launching something as well.  At Quizlet, we've been very deliberate about defi ...Read More

Great question! My response to "At what point is a solution ready to be shipped?" applies here.  The aspect of launching a true MVP is harder in a large organization, when the expectations from the customers are high and I think rightly so as the stakes are maybe much higher.  In my experience, what helps calm the nerves is to play out the outcomes with the team: What is the worst case scenario?  Asking why is this not acceptable and thinking through ROI, opportunity or sunk cost on doing more, ...Read More

This quote is easy to agree with and hard to actually live out, especially in a larger company where there are brand standards, legal reviews, and a lot of stakeholders that need to sign off on the product/feature release. The way I like to manage that is by reframing what "embarrassed" means internally. It does not mean shipping something broken or half-baked. It means shipping something intentionally narrow, before you have solved every edge case, to the right set of users who understand what ...Read More

I definitely like this concept, and searching for this mentality in a big organization can be super challenging – I’ve been there twice, where stakeholders expect every release to be polished like a new iPhone launch. Here are some things that I've seen in practice: Frame the launch accordingly: It’s crucial to align everyone on why we’re launching an imperfect (read embarrassing) product. Explicitly set the expectation that the goal of your MVP launch is to gather feedback, not to generate huge ...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

I am a fan of this viewpoint too. Here are some ways you can implement this internally, even in a large organization. Here are some ways I have gone about implementing these: We have developed a culture of experimentation. This helps us test ideas (small or large) quickly and easily. The idea is not to be perfect, but to test them early on and see if there is impact on core metrics. Set clear success metrics and OKR's; this will allow you to show progress towards the larger goal via small steps, ...Read More

This is a tough one! While we all want to launch products with iPhone-level perfection every time, the reality in most companies – and especially for 0 to 1 products – is that customer feedback is useful sooner rather than later. In these situations, I would: Go through a risk assessment with your team: Play out what could happen – good or bad – as a result of putting something imperfect out there. Once these risks have been articulated, it becomes a tangible thing that the team can plan against ...Read More

Reed Hoffman's quote is a reminder that it's important to get a product to market quickly, even if it's not perfect, in order to gather feedback and iterate based on that feedback. Mark Zuckerberg championed "Move fast and break things" at Facebook which is similar philosophy as well. However, in a larger company, there can be internal anxiety and pressure to release a polished product, which can make it difficult to live out this quote. Here are some ways to navigate this tension and live out t ...Read More

Great question! I do agree with Reid's quote, that said I do think your first version should still be "valuable" so then you know whether it will really solve the problem. Regarding how to get buy-in from stakeholders in large companies, think about what they care about and frame what you are doing accordingly. Bring customer quotes and audio/video clips on why you are trying this out and propose this as an experiment you are trying to run. Start small so that you are not impacting every custome ...Read More

First, while I understand the sentiment, I never want to be embarresed by any version of the product my teams launch. I prefer to subscribe to the saying "perfect is the enemy of good enough". The point really is, you need to get early versions of your product that are usable in the hands of users quickly, so you can get real world user feedback in order to know what needs to be fixed/enhanced/perfected to gain user adoption and growth. If you spend too long iterating internally on the product o ...Read More

#1: Trust. You have to earn it. It's all fun and games when there is "nothing to lose" and you're a small scrappy startup. But once you have paying customers, usage targets to hit, churn numbers to report on, and revenue numbers to hit, it starts to feel harder to launch. I've been through this transition as a startup turns into a real company and have found having the following things in place really helps: Trust from the rest of the org that you are THE expert on your customers. I was fortunat ...Read More

You work with a set of customers who are your design partners (represent your target customer base) to validate iterations of the product - the set of features, the product experience, the solution approach, etc. Authentic feedback from the potential customers helps you not only hone early versions but also build up quantitative (usage) and qualitative (CSAT) data to appease anxiety around launching a new product and gauging its readiness. You’ll never solve all customer requests for any product ...Read More

I like this quote but it's a hell of a lot easier said than done when dealing with corporate bureaucracy. Id really focus on going hardcore on this: Find allies who get it - product leads, engineers, designers who are hungry to move fast. You need a core team that's ready to break some eggs. Create an MVP as a limited test to gather data but label it as a controlled test. it's harder for risk-averse execs to shoot down a "learning opportunity." This WILL be rough around the edges so have stakeho ...Read More