Reece Chowdhry’s Post

🌟🚀 From Concept to Success: How world-class product development can set you apart from the competition 🌟🚀 Sometimes, the most profound insight comes from those who navigate the trenches daily. We had the pleasure of hosting Sarah M., who works in product operations at Uber and has worked across strategy, operations and product in high-growth, unicorn and late-stage tech companies. Sarah’s knowledge and experience helped us understand what it takes for #startup teams to build great products. Here’s what we learned: 🔑🎯 Key Principles for building Good Products: Clarity of Vision: Sarah underscored the importance of having clear, outcome-based objectives when operating as a startup - as opposed to only focusing only on the financials or on shipping as many features as possible. Think #Dropbox in its early days, who set their objectives to focus solely on providing seamless file syncing to its users. Roadmap Rigour: A well-articulated roadmap is your blueprint to success. #Airbnb’s product development strategy was to first focus on a few iterations before getting hosts to love the product, they then focused on guest quality and host coverage. Feature Focus: In the early stages, your goal should be to achieve product-market fit. Identify the core, must-have features that address your users’ pain points, and see if it lands. #Instagram only started with a simple photo-sharing social media. Agile Adaptability: In the spirit of ‘fail fast, learn faster’, it is crucial to be ready to pivot - #Slack transformed from a gaming platform to a collaboration giant by following user demand. Testing Tenacity: Before launching, test not just extensively, but smartly. Effective testing should make the team able to move faster - not slower! Feedback Fidelity: The voice of the customer is the most critical voice in the room. Collect, consider, and act on customer feedback relentlessly- #Duolingo uses user feedback to tweak its language learning pathways, enabling them to optimise the effectiveness and user engagement of the app. 🔍📈 From our experience as pre-seed investors, we've discerned a pattern: Founders who present a clear product vision, supported by an #MVP or a Figma blueprint at pre-seed, are 2X more likely to secure follow-on funding. It’s a testament to the power of preparedness and tangible proof of concept. 🔑💡 Key Questions for Founders at pre-seed: •⁠  ⁠How do your goals translate into a no-code MVP? •⁠  ⁠What’s the compass guiding your #product roadmap? •⁠  ⁠Which features are your ‘must-haves’ for early release? •⁠  ⁠What does iteration mean to you and your engineers? •⁠  ⁠How do you filter and prioritise customer feedback? 💫 So, for all the #investors and #founders out there: Build fast, test rigorously, iterate wisely, and stay open to the uncharted waters of innovation. 🌻 Sarah M., a sincere thank you from the entire team for the wisdom and product insight. #ProductManagement #Leadership #StartUpWisdom