June 24th, 2003, was the first day of life after SARS in Beijing. The World Health Organization just removed the travel warning for the area. On that same day, I landed in the city.

I temporarily relocated there with 2 more developers from my company. We were trying to catch up and close the timeline gaps SARS has created for an important tech transfer project with a Chinese startup.

After multiple fever checks, we arrived in the city. Despite its population of 6 million people at the time, it felt like a ghost town.

We stayed in one of the most central hotels, with 30 floors of fancy guest rooms, a business center, and a gym with a swimming pool – right at the heart of the city. When we arrived, only one elevator worked, and most floors were closed (you couldn’t access them at all). No breakfast was served, and even the receptionist wasn’t always there.

We went for a walk – it was my first time in China – and the streets were almost empty. The few people who were there still were all wearing masks. When they saw us – evidently foreigners by our looks – they waved and smiled. Some even clapped their hands in happiness. They were all thrilled to see tourists again. We were their first signal of normal life after the disease.

Beijing’s famous shopping street – Wangfujing, a wide pedestrian zone spread over 1.8 KM (1.12 miles), was abandoned. Stores were closed, and empty luxury hotel lobbies could be seen behind their locked doors.

Over the next few days, we saw the city getting back to life. First, breakfast opened up at the hotel. It wasn’t very rich, only a few basic products, but with each day they added a few more. The next day, newspapers were available again in the lobby, and some of the stores opened.

Within a week, the city went back to normal. 6-million-busy-people normal. Many of them were still wearing masks, and fever checks continued at the entrance of crowded places like shopping malls and train stations, but even that stopped after another week or two. By the end of July, SARS was officially over.

Other than the fact that it all happened exactly 20 years ago and I’m feeling nostalgic (and old), I’m sharing this story to remind you that there is life after any crisis. It is easy to connect the SARS epidemic to the COVID era because they are truly related, but it seems that in tech, COVID was an opportunity much more than it was a threat. In a way, the economic downturn we see now is the actual aftereffect of COVID. 

Regardless of its origins, the downturn is here. For how long? No one knows. Will 2024 be better or worse than 2023? Time will tell. But for your own company to do well until then, here are a few things you must excel in. 

A New Level of Focus

It seems like a trivial piece of advice. Everyone understands that when resources are limited focus is more important than ever. But focus on what?

For most people and during the regular course of things, focus means making sure you are working on the important things, and saying no to anything else.

While that’s an important aspect of it, I would like to suggest that in order to survive this crisis, you need to add another dimension to focus.

Think about photo shooting: you first need to select the object you want to focus on. That’s the kind of focus we are all used to – choose only the most important things.

But then you need to make sure you see the object clearly and sharp. That’s the other dimension of focus that is less talked about.

In the product world, the first dimension means deciding on important things and prioritizing them. The second dimension means deepening the understanding of why they are important, and what is it about them that is important. This is critical in order to (1) make sure you are working on the right things when your resources are sparse, and (2) increase your confidence that you will actually get the results you need, and not just work hard.

To get to this additional layer of focus, reasoning must work overtime. Make sure you can connect the dots very very clearly between what you are doing and your desired outcome (which especially in times like this should lead all the way to a business result, not “a good feature” or “happy customer”).

A common practice to get there is to ask as many “why”s as needed (most likely 5 won’t be enough). I also like replacing the “why” with asking “So what?”. It helps since it forces us to ask a very specific flavor of why – like “Why is it important” or “Why does it even matter”, and get very crisp on the actual point we want to make.

To get to this level of crispiness, you must get a deeper understanding of how one thing leads to another – at least in theory. You need to have a product strategy.

As I said in the past, a product strategy has to make sense to you before you invest anyone else’s work in it. If you can’t clearly and in great detail explain the reasoning behind your theory, it’s not a good one to follow. Note: even if it is super clear and logical, it doesn’t mean it would work in the real world. That’s why we must take action and test it. But if it doesn’t work on paper, it will never work in the real world. 

When resources are sparse, each time you use them costs you more relatively, even if the nominal amount is the same. You can’t afford to make mistakes that you could have avoided. 

There are many ways to crisp up your strategy. One of my favorites is to ask someone to play your devil’s advocate (which is what I do with the startups I’m advising to) and take their feedback super seriously. It always helps.

A New Level of Goals

To be able to focus and lead the company toward its goals, you must understand these goals in depth. You need to understand the financials of your company very clearly (product leaders – this is your responsibility even if you are not founders!) and mark the critical path for the next couple of years.

Generic revenue goals are insufficient for handling this crisis, and frankly for any company to thrive.

Most startup founders, for example, know exactly when they would need to raise the next round, and generally understand which business results they must demonstrate to be able to do so. But a dollar amount goal is not enough to help you actually get there. How will you get to these dollars? Is it by selling a lot of small deals? Or perhaps just a few large ones? Or a mixture of both? 

These questions are important because they help you reveal blindspots that most founders don’t get to see. Do you have the proper channels to make these deals you are counting on? Does your current pipeline support them? Is your product valuable enough to be sold for the amount that you are looking for your customers to pay? What does it take to get there?

The bottom line is you must not let the dollar amount be the end goal. Sometimes you will realize that the money itself is not enough (for example, if you have serious churn this is a major problem on your way to getting additional funding). You must make sure the goals are clear, the right ones, and understand how you are going to get to these results. At the end of the day, you need to be convinced that these calculations make sense, and you need to see yourself achieving the needed results.

If you don’t see how you are going to achieve these results, you need to refine the plan until you do. It’s ok to have stretch goals and work hard to get them. It’s not ok to have unrealistic goals set simply because these are the goals you need, because you would be driving high-speed into a brick wall.

You don’t need to do this alone. If you are looking for creative ideas, you can use your team. Create a hackathon (with or without the coding part), and brainstorm together.

Sometimes, it won’t add up. You might get pressure to continue working on customer projects that you would otherwise walk away from, just to keep the company alive. That’s fine for a while, as long as you understand the end game.

How long do you expect this phase to be? What would be the immediate revenue stream? When and how will you go back to plan A, and how will that plan get you the results you need?

These are hard questions, and you might not be able to get all the answers. While you don’t want to get into analysis paralysis, make sure you spend enough time thinking about these and making a serious attempt to fully answer them. You’ll be in a much better place knowing the answers – and knowing where your answers are lacking – than ignoring it altogether.

A New Level of Alignment

In times like these you must make the most out of the resources you have. You are probably thinking about developers – because that’s indeed the most expensive part of tech companies. Making sure your developers work on the right things – building the right product and not just building the product right – is critical. But you also need to make sure that all other departments are working together to bring results.

A great product – unlike many promises you might have heard – wouldn’t sell itself. You need accurate marketing and sales efforts to create an end-to-end customer journey that ends in a purchase. But how would marketing and sales know what to work on? They are not selling the product, they are selling its value, which is much harder to identify and define than initially seems.

That’s what a product strategy does – it connects all the dots so that you can build a product that is not only good for the users but also marketable and sellable. It creates a new level of alignment between all the stakeholders in the company so that they all work together to generate the results you need and not in silos that end up in a lot of effort but little outcomes.

I help companies create a solid product strategy in two ways: for startup founders, I serve as an advisor and coach where we think things together and work it over and over again until all the dots (and all the stakeholders) are connected. For product leaders who own this non-trivial task, I have created the CPO Bootcamp program to do just that under our close guidance and feedback.

With or without my help, I hope you manage to get to the other side of the downturn stronger. And whatever you do, don’t stop moving forward, because action is the only way to succeed.