Is your Product ready for Scale?
Premature scaling kills the best products
A common pitfall amongst Product Managers working on a new product is that they start executing for scale too early — even before the product is ready. Of course, a path to scale and profitability is the holy grail for any business, but that may backfire when one starts chasing scale prematurely and worse still, for a product that is still to prove its worth. This happens a LOT especially in companies where leaders are focused on the short term outcomes and want results fast.
The focus on quick outcomes is understandable, especially for public companies trying to maximize stock performance—but it is in these circumstances that the role of a Product Manager becomes even more important. Instead of blindly over-hiring, building unmanageable customer acquisition plans, and driving rapid market expansion, PMs should first ask themselves “ Is my product ready for primetime?”.
If not, the Product Manager must act as the counterweight and have the management courage to articulate this reality to leaders and investors of the business.
Premature Scaling
To be sure, premature scaling is not always an inorganic, top-down phenomenon pushed by the higher-ups in a company. It can also set in due to the following missteps by the Product Manager, especially if they
Misunderstand product readiness
Make Product decisions to justify the resources at their disposal
Product Managers misunderstand if their products are ready for scale when product adoption metrics are either not set up at all, or are at best subjective and biased. In the absence of objective metrics, the Product Manager can easily fall victim to their own confirmation biases and start interpreting, favoring, and recalling information that confirms their gut feelings. It sets into motion this vicious cycle of driving more growth than what the product is ready for. This effect is amplified when you are working under management pressure and unrealistic deadlines— it’s easy then for the PM to get distracted and start working on the wrong stuff. Ultimately, this doesn’t end well for anybody.
The second misstep - making product decisions to justify resources is another cause leading to premature scaling and is often less talked about. This happens way more than most Product folks like to admit. In fact, I have experienced this with my own team. We had a very promising product, or so we thought— and instead of pressure testing our ‘this product is awesome’ hypothesis, we worked round the clock inside our offices to make sure the thing could withstand all that our imaginary users would throw at it. We had the engineering resources to make it happen and so while we had them why not belt out as many features as we could? Even before the product had any real customer validation, we started executing on features roadmaps, building things that we thought users cared out. We did user interviews, yes, but then again we didn’t really take the time to understand what users were really saying. In the rush to execute we overlooked timing the scale, product-market fit, and customer validation.
In hindsight, this was an expensive mistake forced under the immense pressure to look good and to justify the valuable builder resources we were provided with. We focused on the exact wrong thing. We had forgotten the customer along the way.
Over the years, I learned that what happened to us was not uncommon. No wonder, most new products that are launched are NOT successful, or at best are set up for mediocrity.
To be clear, I am not for one moment suggesting that activities to scale are not important — in fact, achieving scale is paramount for any real business to make money. You need to achieve scale and get there profitably.
But we also need to remind ourselves often that scale comes later, what comes first is the answer to the following question
Do you have a product that at least a dozen of your customers cannot live without?
If the answer is NO, don’t waste time thinking about scale. Your product has not found your first customers. Focus on that.
Handcraft Your Product First
If there is one thing people take away about the lean startup movement, its the “Do things that don’t scale” philosophy. If you do nothing else, do this one thing really well.
You must handcraft the product for one customer first. Serve this customer all the time — ask them what would it take for your product to absolutely delight them, to solve their problems. Iterate. Do the exact opposite of scale.
Understand what is the perfect product for this customer.
Continuously validate if your handcrafted iterations are really delighting the customer. Create unbiased objective metrics to gauge this.
Did you delight your first customer? Yes? Go find another person and let your product delight them. NO? Please ask them why and iterate.
(By the way, don’t be surprised if you find that the perfect product for this customer is way simpler than what you were trying to build in the first place. )
Shift gears …when the time is right
Once you have found 10–15 evangelists ( a number based on experience and what successful founders have often noted) that would do anything to use your product because you solve a pressing need — then think about getting to the next 100 customers, then the next 1000, 10000 & hopefully millions of customers if you are doing it right.
As you go in steps, you’ll ride the experience curve and start hitting economies of scale, you’ll start to see the top 5 features that 90% of your customers care about, understand adjacent monetization opportunities. You’ll hit scale, profitably.
Remember, you cannot rush this process. Shift gears when the time is right.
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