“Build What Matters” Framework for Startups
Many startups with an ordinary product make the way to growth and scalability whereas others with great products fail to survive. What is wrong with these startups?
Both product and product strategy should fall in place to make the startup sustainable and help them to grow. The importance of measuring the small outcomes associated with their product goals or visions is the key to churn expected benefits throughout the product life cycle. The below image is a simple framework but it is a growth platform that helps in setting up startups, mid-size or even big enterprises. In due course, the startups need to invest a good amount of time in organizing the strategy and roadmap to track the product performance to get an early product-market fit and scalability. The framework provides a platform to keep the pace of sustainability for a longer time than quick failure.
How does this framework work?
The unique proposition of the framework is considering Discovery & Framing (D&F) and Outcomes as important attributes to drive the startups. Continuous experiments and user research, a part of D&F act as a preventative layer and bring stability while de-risking the product to save time, effort and money. Hence, the framework I call “Onboarding Startup” is a combination of a goal, strategy, outcomes, D&F, and roadmap, a perfect recipe for the investment priorities of the startups. In summary, this framework gives an opportunity to discover, experiment, build, measure, learn and sell the product for outcomes aligned with the product vision. Now compare the approach with building product based only on ideation/ assumption, or copying the competitors’ value props, the onboarding startup framework is safe, portable, quick, and profitable to sustain in the market and to achieve product-market fit and scalability in long term.
What are the attributes of the framework?
Vision: It should be inspirational and the guiding post. What and Why and the inspirational differences that product brings.
Pro Tips: Invest a good time in brainstorming to get the vision done.
Goals: Goals should be S.M.A.R.T. It helps in realizing the vision in a measurable way. The goals can be expanded across marketing, sales, development, product management, a quality that should collectively represent the vision and outcomes expected from the product.
What is S.M.A.R.T?
SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound.Strategy/Tactics: Strategies are the “How” part of the goal, but it is not the set of activities. Avoid writing tasks or steps while defining strategy. Defining strategy takes time and should be reviewed multiple times. For instance, a chess player formulates the strategies considering all outcomes before going for any planned move.
E.g a startup that builds weight management products specifically for people who are not self-driven for weight management.
Vision: Create a world-class application to keep everyone’s healthy and slim without investing time.
Goal: On average new customer base should be increased by x% QoQ.
Strategy: Deliver compelling stories of existing customers weight loss journey.
Pro tactics: A goal can have multiple strategies. But, that doesn’t mean there should be many :). The trick is to create strategies that are impactful. Plotting strategies on X & Y axis- “easy to execute” vs “business value” can be a good way to pick a few impactful strategies.
Define strategies that are totally aligned with the underlying product(s) and time to time communicate to the team. The point to be noted that business strategy drives the product(s) strategy, so they are not two different things but like universal sets and subsets.
Success measure:
Again a S.M.A.R.T measure. It can be further categorized as lag and lead. At the business level, define lag measures and lead measures at the product level. Many lead measures can collectively show the progress of the lag. For example, revenue, order, customer experience, conversion are examples of lag measures as they will alone certainly not tell what is not working but when incorporated with lead measures show the specific action, feedback, & pattern on users preferences. The measures decide how strategies are achieved.
Eg:
X% increase revenue by Q4 (Lag metric)
# of times users perform a <action> using your product (Lead metric; this impacts the revenue cycle
Pro tactics: spend a good time brainstorming for defining lead and lag measures. Don’t take it lightly. These are the basic foundation of your startup which help to stay aligned to vision, goals and outcomes. Product usability/feature specific metrics can easily be defined as lead metrics.
Business outcomes:
It represents the intent of goals and strategies and important attributes to evolve the enterprise/product roadmap. Outcomes directly help to ensure the products do not remain on a bucket list of features but create value instead during each release or in MVP. The illusionary aspect of the feature bucket is it looks great with cutting edge technologies and having a good user experience but may not allow customers to get their necessary jobs done with respect to competitors’ apps or manual work. This is the reason discovery and framing has an important role in the startup onboarding framework to allow startups to create value and validated outcomes.
Pro tactics: Relook the goals and strategy and brainstorm on visualizing the intent behind the pair of goals and strategies. That intent is your outcome.
Strategic roadmap:
A strategic roadmap holds the business direction needed to drive goals and strategies. This strategic roadmap basically keeps high-level business outcomes. Typically it keeps the high-level view of 2 to 3 years but should be flexible to adoption frequent changes based on the underlying product performance in the market.
Typically strategy roadmap is a place where business goals, strategies, measures display the overall direction and progress of the startup. The common attributes of the strategic roadmap can be-
- Goals QoQ/MoM/YoY
- Strategies
- TAM/TOM etc
- Risks
Pro tips: Avoid detailing with dates and months, no task lists, keep it simple with minimal attributes. It is not an enterprise where fancy design and jargon works. Keep it simple and digestible.
Product roadmap:
Finally, everything comes and sit on top of your product roadmap in the form of the right backlogs for features that are tested and validated and aligned to the goals and outcomes.
The important attributes can be-
Feature details (high level) with a clear set of outcomes
Associated risk: Technical, financial, social, compliance, etc
Success measures: Lead only (refer to success measure section)
Defined cadence
Tricks/tactics: Make data the backbone of the startup for all dimensions. In startup review, your roadmap quarterly doesn’t inspire from enterprise so keep it simple but impactful. When I said feature details, that doesn’t mean the task lists. It can be Theme, Epic etc.
The framework can be used by any mid-size firm and can fit into enterprises with some changes to cascade the goals from top to bottom :)
Hope this helps!! Reach out to me for any queries for onboarding your startup using the framework. I have been doing consulting and advising work with startups, so let me know if you have any questions about this article.
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