🎙️ Pod Shots

In the fast-paced world of startups, creating a successful product strategy is crucial for achieving growth and market success. On a recent edition of the 20VC Podcast, Vickie Peng, a product planner at Sequoia, shared valuable insights on different customer mindsets and how they impact product development. Let's delve into her advice and explore practical tips for building a winning product strategy.

⚒️ Vickie Peng: Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product?

🎥 Watch the full episode here 

📆 Published: April 18th, 2024

🕒 Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes. Time saved: 50 minutes🔥 

🎯 Establishing a North Star Metric

Key Advice: Customer-Centric Metrics Over NPS
Vickie emphasizes the importance of selecting a North Star metric that directly reflects customer satisfaction and product engagement, suggesting that startups should avoid traditional metrics like NPS. Instead, she recommends actionable metrics directly linked to product use—such as API calls or dashboard interactions—which she believes more accurately signal customer happiness.

Practical Tip: Use Product-Specific Actions
Identify actions within your product that customers frequently engage with, indicating strong product utility. This approach not only measures success more accurately but also aligns product development directly with user satisfaction, leading to more targeted improvements.

🔄 The Cycle of Conviction and Action

From Early Career Insights to Execution
Reflecting on her experience at TrialPay, Vickie discusses the cycle of building conviction and taking action. This cycle involves developing a hypothesis based on market needs, creating a product to test this hypothesis, and using the results to strengthen belief in the product's value.

Practical Tip: Minimize to Optimize
Startups should focus on creating minimum viable products that allow them to test hypotheses quickly and efficiently without overbuilding. This approach saves resources and enables quicker pivoting based on feedback and learning.

📈 Internal and External Belief in Products

The Challenge of Belief
Vickie shares that one of the greatest challenges in product management is building belief—not just among potential customers but within the organisation. This internal advocacy is crucial, especially when resources are diverted from core products to support new initiatives.

Practical Tip: Advocate Passionately
Product managers should actively work to foster belief in the product's potential both inside and outside the company. This involves clear communication of the product's benefits and strategic demonstrations of its potential impact.

🗣️ The Art of Storytelling in Product Marketing

Customer-Centric Narratives
A common mistake Vickie identifies is that startups often frame their product's value proposition from their own perspective rather than the customer's. She advises reversing this by emphasising how the product changes the customer’s life, focusing on solving their problems and enhancing their experiences.

Practical Tip: Problem Before Solution
When communicating with potential users, focus first on understanding and addressing their problems before promoting the product's features. This approach ensures that the product aligns with actual user needs and builds a stronger case for its adoption.

🚀 Scaling with Non-scalable Actions

Embracing Unscalability
Addressing a common startup axiom, Vickie agrees that to scale, sometimes you need to embrace actions that aren't scalable in the short term. [Speaking from experience this is incredibly important!!] This includes manual interventions or personalised customer interactions, which can provide invaluable insights and foster customer loyalty.

Practical Tip: Wizard of Oz Techniques
Employ behind-the-scenes manual processes to simulate product features or services before they are fully automated. This can help validate concepts without full-scale development.

🌟 Conclusion: Building Less to Achieve More

Vickie Peng’s insights remind us that effective product management is not about the quantity of features or products built but about the precision and impact of those features. For tech startups and scaleup leadership, focusing on strategic, customer-centric actions can lead to more meaningful engagement and sustainable growth.

Final Tip: Keep Learning and Iterating
The tech landscape is continuously evolving, and so should product strategies. Stay adaptable, always be ready to learn from real-world feedback, and refine your approach to product development and management accordingly.

Want to know more quickly? Just ask the episode below [web only]👇️ 🤯 
or if you prefer, 🎥 Watch the full episode here 

📅 Timestamps:

• [00:02:09] The cycle of conviction and action.

• [00:06:04] The power of storytelling.

• [00:07:01] Differentiation in storytelling and marketing.

• [00:09:46] Running performance marketing on a spreadsheet.

• [00:13:22] The power of reframing problems.

• [00:18:33] A great product mission.

• [00:19:36] Customer Happiness Metrics.

• [00:24:54] Product Mistakes and Lessons.

• [00:26:23] Product-market fit as a journey.

• [00:29:27] Differentiation in product marketing.

• [00:34:29] It is what it is.

• [00:38:07] Future vision.

• [00:40:47] Challenges of "Hair on Fire"

• [00:44:30] Distribution trumps all.

• [00:48:00] The biggest product marketing mistake.

• [00:50:58] Impressive product strategy.

• [00:52:25] Building products for different roles.