One of the companies I’m consulting to is going through a pivot. A major one. It’s not an easy thing to do, and since they already reached the cap with their previous direction that they thought would be huge, they are very cautious in declaring a new one. It took us a few months to find a solid direction that everyone felt comfortable even trying. For a startup, that’s eternity. So on one hand the founders didn’t want to move recklessly to a non-validated or questionable direction, and on the other hand, everyone knew they needed to move fast (every day costs your startup a lot of money).

When we finally agreed on the direction to be validated, it felt like changing gears. From sitting around the discussion table and debating strategies, they needed to move into quick action at an entirely different pace. But people were confused: what should everyone be doing next? Should we create a work plan for the new product and start right away? Do salespeople need to start selling the new direction before it’s ready?

Some of these questions are more relevant in a pivot situation than in the everyday journey to product-market fit, but many of them are almost always relevant. If you find yourself wondering about the same things, this is the guide for you.

The Goal: To Develop the Right Product

Product development is typically the most expensive part of the company. So while you have engineers working and you want to keep them busy, you better make sure they are working on the right product. Every day they are working on something else, or even something that is not 100% accurate costs you a lot of money. This doesn’t mean that you need to get into analysis paralysis and avoid any development if you aren’t 100% sure it’s the right one, because you do want to meet the market quickly and learn as you go, but it does mean that you start with a debt that you need to close as fast as you can. That’s why this is the first topic we dive into right at the beginning of the CPO Bootcamp.

Acknowledging that finding the right product takes time is a great first step. It sets a very different context for anything anyone would be working on from now on. Specifically, to answer the questions raised above, R&D shouldn’t be working on the product with full power right away. Instead, they should be working on whatever they can do to make sure you find the right product as quickly as possible. This could be a lot of work in and of itself, and some of the work would look as if they are going full power to build the product, but your everyday decision making and prioritization would come from a different angle and that’s a major difference that would eventually impact the outcome.

Similarly, the sales team shouldn’t be selling the new product before it’s ready. Instead, they should use selling methodologies and resources to help you ensure this direction is the right one and define the right product.

Create a Feedback Loop

To achieve product success, all parts of the company must be fully aligned and coordinated: you need to make sure you understand exactly the problem you are solving and for whom, marketing needs to talk about it in the language the customers think about it, sales need to sell exactly that, and the product needs to deliver the actual value that was formerly promised to the customer. If there are short circuits in this system, nothing will work, or at least you won’t be able to get to a happy customer at the end (which means that even if some things would work, you will still not achieve your goal). 

For everything to work well together, you need to set a mechanism that will allow all the different parties to communicate well. Remember that since you still don’t know what is the right product, and you are essentially experimenting with what you currently have, everyone involved needs to know how well you are performing in the real world. What results you were able to achieve, not on paper, in the bank. Now, you need to be aware that getting real results in the bank takes time. Most of the time when you look at results they will not be there. But while great results are, well, great, the fact that you don’t have them yet isn’t so bad as long as you use it to learn and make progress in the right direction. Remind yourself that you are still exploring, and it’s ok to explore as long as you understand what you are doing and how it takes you closer to your goals, one step at a time.

To make sure this feedback is flowing flawlessly from the market – where things really happen – into the company, make sure you have a mechanism in place to bring it in regularly. My favorite mechanism is a weekly meeting that includes representatives from sales, marketing, product, and development.

R&D Should Be Focused on Sales

To close the feedback loop, you need to make sure that everyone has eyes on the goal, and the goal is the business viability of your product. It means that everyone – yes, including R&D – should be concerned about the business results that the product is able to deliver. If you go with my recommendation above to have a weekly meeting for feedback, this meeting should start with a review of the business metrics that you were able to achieve this week. Remember that actually generating meaningful results (AKA money in the bank) takes time, but even if you see $0 in front of you every week it helps make sure that everyone knows that we are looking to break this barrier.

Before you are able to generate revenue, there are many other milestones that you need to meet. You need to reach customers, you need to talk to them about a problem that interests them enough to explore solving it with you, you need to convince them to give you a chance, you need to prove that it was worth it, and so on and so forth. The phases are not very different regardless of the industry or strategy you use (B2C vs. B2B, product-led growth vs. sales-led, etc.). The implementation of each phase is of course very different. Either way, map your customer journey and make sure you conquer it one step at a time. Simply put: you weren’t able to generate revenue yet? Ok, what were you able to generate? And what prevents you from breaking into the next step?

This is the level of discussion that everyone in the company needs to be involved in, not just sales and the people who actually meet the market and own the results. As a product leader, you have a critical role in making sure the right questions are asked. It is your job to make sure that sales and marketing know that they are not alone in this battle, and to make sure that everyone in R&D knows that this is their battle as well.