Everyone hates oppressive processes, but somehow we keep managing to create them.

Process should add value, not prevent it. Lightweight processes can drive a business forward. But when policies are layered on top of each other, it leads to a bureaucratic bulk that’s a drag on productivity.

No one intends to build a cumbersome bureaucracy. Policies are a response to corporate trauma. A Bad Thing happens. You create a system to prevent that problem. At some point, more Bad Things happen and your new system didn’t stop them. You react to the trauma with more policies.

Continue Reading »

Add-on products won’t help you grow. They’re limited to your current customers and only some of them will buy an add-on. Your total market is constrained.

Creating and selling add-ons to existing customers is easy. It’s hard to envision how you’d sell a standalone product.

Add-on sales can boost revenue, but this isn’t sustainable growth. Some customers won’t buy this, so the add-on will grow more slowly than your main product. Even if the combination attracts some new customers, you’re still mostly selling to existing customers.

While add-ons don’t work as a growth lever, they can help you reach more customers by unbundling your product. They are a powerful pricing and packaging tactic. By splitting your product into a lower core price and paid extras, you can still capture the higher revenue from those that need the extra capabilities while still serving a broader market.

Continue Reading »

When your next product is going to use your same technology but sold to new people (the Same Product strategy) the product must truly be the same. You can expect to make product changes, of course. You might add features. You might re-package and re-brand the product. You might change how you sell it. But it’s important to keep the main benefits and the core technology the same. These are the soul of your product.

If you try to change the core product concepts and sell to a new audience, you’re changing everything about the product. It’s no longer a market expansion where you use your existing knowledge for a new market. With no overlap between the old and the new, you’re not gaining leverage or efficiencies. You’re just doubling your work.

It’s easy to mess this up. You find a similar market that needs your product. But they need some tweaks. The more you dig in, the more differences you uncover and the more changes you make. Eventually, you’ve created a completely different product and sold it in a different way to different people. The new product has a different Product Soul. There’s so little overlap that the two products might as well be separate companies.

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »