How do we keep our product advantage? 🤔 We are building a product in a competitive market, and we come up against a variety of other tools in many of the deals we're in. I genuinely believe we have the best product on the market, but often ask myself: how do we keep it that way? Yes, we can be secretive about your product to an extent, but ultimately most things can be copied by another reasonably good product team—at least, at a shallow level. So, in absence of a Coca-Cola style secret recipe, how do we make sure our product stays ahead? 👟 Speed 👟 Putting aside a Tortoise-and-Hare situation, if we start ahead, and continue to ship faster than our competitors, we'll stay ahead. That's why we always talk about Leverage. Building abstractions that help us ship high quality product at pace is the best way to stay ahead. If it costs us 2 days to build something, and our competitor 2 weeks to copy it, we are at a huge advantage. Whether that's building new integrations or enabling new workflow steps, having strong foundations we can build quickly on is what will help us keep our lead. 🧩 Cohesion 🧩 A great product is better than the sum of its parts. Each feature we add creates complexity—yet more things for your users to onboard into and understand. If we keep making our product wider and wider, we'll end up with something that might 'tick all the boxes' but is really hard for our customers to actually use in the real world. Instead, we are always trying to build a cohesive product, where each feature builds on the last. That means our customers can configure something once (e.g. Catalog), and then use that setup across the product. Any investment they make into configuration is repaid many times over, and is a far more attractive proposition. 🏋️ Support🏋️ Particularly when you're building for other businesses, you need to be able to support your customers to get the best from your tool. Having timely and helpful support can completely change the way someone experiences your product. Building partnerships with our customers is also a genuine win-win: we get a tonne of super valuable and honest feedback, and they get an influential voice in our conversations about product direction and priorities.
Martin Smith
3mo
Your support / "on point" process and everything y'all do within it is just magic... I was telling Lucy Jennings a few months ago that I wished I could easily describe it to folks who haven't experienced it. It's as large of a paradigm shift as putting developers on call for the code they write. Also thanks for replying to my API question just the other day, through that process, Lisa -- that was a small example of something that could have taken a week or multiple tickets for me, and hopefully gave a peek into what a customer was thinking about in the process. 🎉
Co-founder and CEO at incident.io 🔥
3moWell said Lisa! On your last point: I think the recent change we made to have Customer Support as part of Product Development is a really great example of systemically making sure Product are close to customers, and are aware of every rough edge a customer feels. We were good at this anyway IMO, but it feels like a good change!