Startups often need to introduce a second product sooner than expected to sustain growth. Because you’ve tightly defined your market and ideal customer, you can quickly saturate that market.

The early adopters you mostly sold to begin to dry up. You targeted a tiny niche. As a startup, you needed to focus on the few people who needed something badly enough to take a chance on an unproven company. But now, you’ve seen success, defined a market, and competitors are starting to appear. They’re putting pressure on your first product.

Growth slows unexpectedly. There isn’t a new product on the horizon. This is a stall that can kill a company.

A second product is the cure. But when is the right time to add one? And what should it be? There’s a framework I like to use to pick when to launch that product and identify the right second product.

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The people, processes, and systems that make up a product organization change radically as you go through the stages of a company. A scaled organization isn’t just about increasing the size but about changing the focus and makeup of the organization as the company’s focus and needs change.

These changes are not only driven by how large a company is. A young 500-person single-product company that hasn’t solved its market has much different scaling problems than a similar-sized older company multi-product company that hasn’t introduced a new product in years. This is true even if both expect the same revenue and employee growth.

For purposes of scale, I think about three company stages. Invention, Craft, and Optimization.

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I’ve long used OBS to manage things for my video calling. I started because my DSLR has a 4:3 aspect ratio that I wanted to crop to a widescreen view. Over time, I’ve added color correction, multiple cameras, and a nameplate overlay.

But when I switched between computers, my video call setup wasn’t easy to take with me. And some video calling platforms (Google Meet, especially) suck so many resources from the computer that running something heavy like OBS often leads to dropped frames, frozen video, and video turning off. When I join a call from my five-year-old Intel MacBook, the fans run so loud that people on the call can hear them.

I had an old Dell Windows laptop gathering dust, so I decided to build a setup with that as a dedicated video management machine that provides a virtual camera over the network to my other computers. This blog post describes how I set it up.

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Roadmaps should be outcomes, not features. What customer or business problem do you want to solve, and what does it look like when you’ve solved it? An outcome roadmap isn’t full of things you’ll do. It’s full of the things that happened because of the things you did.

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Your customers need fewer details than your co-workers. Your product organization requires a different level of detail than your sales and marketing teams. The people working on other parts of your product need more detail than those working on other products. And the members of your product team need specific details that no one else does.

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Too many leaders are so afraid of micromanaging that they become completely hands off.

But giving instruction to build competence is not micromanagement. Neither is providing feedback. Avoiding instruction or feedback because you fear the micromanager label does a disservice to your employee.

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