Emotional Courage

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I was thrust into the world of leadership very early on in my professional career due to a pure chance event. When Verizon’s vice chairman Lawrence T. Babbio promised Wall Street that Verizon was adding more than 10 million new lines to the 36 million now equipped with digital subscriber line (DSL) service, a product called Golden Source was funded to meet these objectives. I was one of the developers assigned to this product for DSL loop qualification processing. I reported to a Project Lead who reported to an Engineering Manager. In 2003 while monitoring the data migration scripts at around 3:00 AM, I had a disagreement with my lead on how to handle a technical issue and we ended up arguing over it. During this time, my lead entered into disagreement with his manager for various reasons, and I and his manager became very close. She appreciated my decisiveness and started relying on me for critical tasks.

A few weeks later, she was promoted and was asked to head a new critical initiative for Verizon at a new division. During the same time, my lead had already resigned due to disagreements with his manager. Since the project was almost complete, they decided to put me in charge of Golden Source Product as a project lead, just 2 years into my professional career as a software engineer. Ever since my childhood, I was always consistent in my response to what I wanted to become when I grew up; “I want to do a PhD and become a scientist” I would say. Turns out I ended up not perusing  a PhD and becoming a scientist, and here I was being asked to lead a team of 15 developers with many engineers a lot more experienced than me. This was going exactly the opposite of how I thought my career will go.

I was not trained as a manager, did not have any business school training, and no mentor and no HR training. One fine morning during a staff meeting with my Vice President, I came to find out that I was now the Project Lead for one of the most important (even though almost complete) products at Verizon. As my luck would have it, the Golden Source initiative took a surprising turn with new goals and we were funded another few million dollars to embark on new objectives, which ended up resulting in it becoming a more important and more visible project. I had daily calls with the Group Chief Information Officer (CIO) and visibility for this project was unlike any. Since the previous engineering manager was already moved to another division, it was difficult to move her back and hence I was promoted to the Manager role with multiple leads reporting into me within a few months. I had gone from being a developer to becoming a manager in less than 6 months in 2003 and within 2 years of my professional career.

Both my product and I succeeded and went on to win three awards in 2004 at a Verizon event in New York. In this blog I am going to write about emotional courage. In future blogs, I will cover emotional intelligence, courage, passion, manager vs. leader, and many other critical leadership topics.

So what is Emotional Courage? Do you have what it takes to be a leader? Leadership isn’t something you can learn in a book or in an academic setting. It is part nature and part nurture. You can only nurture leadership by practicing it in real life situations. Leadership at its heart is the courage to take action in uncomfortable and difficult situations. This is called Emotional Courage according Peter Bregman (CEO coach and regular contributor to HBR blogs) who defines it as “standing apart from others without separating yourself from them…speaking up when others are silent… [and] remaining steadfast, grounded, and measured in the face of uncertainty.”

You cannot teach someone leadership in a classroom setting. Leadership can only be learned by doing the actual work, giving people the chance to practice and make difficult decisions in extraordinary circumstances. Best way to give them this opportunity is by putting them in real-world scenarios where they get to make real life difficult decisions where they feel a sense of emotional risk. The only way to teach courage is to require it of people.

Speaking up in difficult situations is another crucial skill for emotional courage and leadership. As Rick Phillips, chief communication officer at Nationwide Insurance says in an article in Communication World, “[Communication] is not a spectator sport, and you have to stick your neck out. You can’t always make the safe play.”

Every manager I have worked for in my career has read innumerable books on leadership and attended multiple training programs, but not all of them were great leaders. What separates a leader from a follower? There is a massive difference between what we know about leadership and what actual leaders do. I have never seen a leader fail because he or she didn’t know enough about leadership. It’s not about knowing what to say or do. It’s about whether you’re willing to experience the discomfort, risk, and uncertainty of saying or doing what it takes. These are the things that distinguish powerful leaders from the weak ones.

In the heat of the moment, when the pressure is on, and your emotions are high, how will you react? Will you let the emotions get better of you, or will you show emotional intelligence and emotional courage. The only way to teach courage is to require it of people. To offer them opportunities to draw from the courage they already have within them. To give them opportunities to step into real situations that they find uncomfortable. I recently met someone who I wanted to train to become a leader and the best way I knew how to do that was to recommend that we do a startup together. There is no better experience than co-founding a startup. The stress one goes through as a startup CEO is unlike any other. The emotional roller coaster one goes through within themselves and with their family and life partners due to startup stress would train even the least experienced person on how to be a leader. Whether the person will pursue it or not, whether the person succeeds as a startup founder or not, he/she will truly learn the hard lessons of leadership, such as remaining clam under pressure, handle stressful situations, show emotional courage, and be decisive. It might be helpful to skim over my other blog “Fear of failure - A motivator for success?” as well.

Passionate Leadership

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This is the 3^rd blog in the leadership series I have been writing on for the past few days. My two previous blogs were “EmotionalCourage” and “Emotional Intelligence”. Leaders need to have many qualities to be successful, but none-is more important than passion.

At the risk of sounding too kumbaya, passion isn’t just a wild, loud, take-no-prisoners sort of quality.  True passion requires honest commitment to something, which you feel strongly about, and staying committed through difficult times. When a leader is passionate, people feel a deep sense of being led in a worthy direction by someone who is committed to something more important than his or her own individual glory.

In the HBR Blog by Joel Stein called Boringness: The Secret to Great Leadership,  Joel talks about how his images of great leaders “were based mainly on movies and sports. I figured great leaders did a lot of alpha-male yelling and inspirational speechmaking.” In doing research for a book, though, he discovered that most really effective leaders aren’t the loud, pizz-azzy kind.  He found, instead, depth of commitment and a quiet attention to the details that allow that commitment to bear fruit.

What qualities of leaders result in people to accept another’s leadership? According to Erika Andersen, Forbes contributor and author of “Leading So People Will Follow”, there are six qualities that people most want to see in their leaders.

• Farsightedness
• Passion
• Courage
• Wisdom
• Generosity
• Trustworthiness

Authors Robert Kriegel and Louis Patler cite a study of 1,500 people over 20 years showing the value of finding your passions within your life:

“At the outset of the study, the group was divided into Group A, 83 percent of the sample, who were embarking on a career chosen for the prospect of making money now in order to do what they want later, and Group B, the other 17 percent of the sample, who had chosen their career path for the reverse reason, they were going to pursue (their passions) what they want to do now and worry about money later. The data showed some startling revelations:

At the end of the 20 years, 101 of the 1,500 had become millionaires.

Of the millionaires, all but one-100 out of 101- were from Group B, the group that had chosen to pursue what they loved (their passions)!”

I wanted to underscore using an example based on my personal experience on how following your passion can lead to success. By 2006, I had already spent 5 years at Verizon and worked/led innumerous products like iView, Golden Source, DSL, Design Services (high speed network provisioning system), Home Networking, and was ready to call it a day.  I had 3 offers on hand from investment banks in New York and also had a MBA admission at IIMC (Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta), one of the best business schools in India. I was invited to lead BAAIS Video product. BAAIS Video was part of the Verizon’s FiOS initiative (a 32 billion dollar investment) and handled the video aspect of the triple-play (voice, data and video). This product was started in 2005 and two leaders had already failed at delivering the product on time. I wrote a deeper technical blog covering my experience on this project in the blog “Global Software Development using SCRUM”.

I had a choice to make. I said to myself “ONE LAST TIME”

By the time, I was invited to look into the product; the Engineering Manager was already fired, 2/3^rd of the team had quit, and the Senior Engineering Manager and Director of Engineering were desperate to turn around the product and had no clue on how to fix the issues and business (which funded the product) had lost all faith in the engineering team to deliver this product.

Once I made the decision to stay and lead this project, the first thing I did was talk to the remaining team (which was no more than 10 people by that time). I told them that I am honestly committed to turning around this product. I discussed my previous experiences with turning around products at Verizon and tried to show genuine passion. I heard everyone’s point of view and presented my thought process and invited everyone in the dialogue to challenge me. Passion balanced with openness goes a long way. As a leader, I rolled up my sleeves and jumped into the architecture and code. I directed all the communication to business through me, to protect the team from any external fire. It was going to be my failure if we failed and teams success if we succeeded (the buck stops at me).

8 of those 10 people ended up staying and committing to the product. We hired more people and by Sept of 2008, we were a 100+ development team. This team was the most sought after team at Verizon, in that everyone wanted to be part of it. We were the most funded product at Verizon, and the youngest team with many of my leads under 23 years of age, and the most successful product of that year. We were a turn-around success story and won awards.

It was the best team that I had the privilege to work with and I still miss working with such high caliber people. I was happy to have led them to success. I succeeded because this was my passion, which helped me rally my team, and my honest commitment to turning around this ship was contagious enough to help me recruit new blood in the team.

A person’s passions can ignite other people’s passions and bring energy into their lives. Real passion provides inspiration that’s much deeper than cheerleading  or a temporary emotional high. When leaders are truly passionate, people feel included in the leader’s commitment to making important things happen.  That’s satisfying on a deep level, and it lasts. If you want to raise your influence, then you need to be a passionate leader.. 

War Commander And Competitive Strategy

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While at business school, Competitive Strategy and Marketing Management were my favorite subjects and I ended up specializing in them.  Of the two, Competitive strategy was my favorite simply because it caters to a human’s basic desire to compete and win. As a co-founder and president of my current company Personagraph, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of a larger company, I end up using a lot of teachings from the competitive strategy class by Pai-Ling Yin and the Advanced Competitive Strategy class by Michael Cusumano. As a product manager in my previous jobs, I benefited a lot from what I learned from these classes. The only other class, which taught me more, was the System Architecture class by Prof. Edward Crawley. You can read my detailed blog on the System Architecture class here.

I have been obsessed with the War Commander game by Kixeye for the last couple of weeks now. It is an extremely addictive game and I ended up spending a lot of money buying weapons, for the first time ever. I finally understand why Zynga is not doing so well in comparison to Kixeye. Apart from being targeted for a different demographic, it is an extremely well made game. The hiring video of Kixeye highlights the type of games they make and the company culture.

I have spent many hours on the game seizing a lot of territory by attacking and capturing enemy territories and it reminded me of what I learned in the Competitive Strategy and Game Theory classes. It took me some time before I recollected what I had read in the book Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by Renee Mauborgne. One of the central themes of the book is that the competitive strategies are modeled after the archaic war strategies (resources are limited and the only way to win is to defeat the enemy and capture their resources).  My favorite quote from the book is “To focus on the red ocean is therefore to accept the key constraining factor of war- limited terrain and the need to beat an enemy to succeed and to deny distinctive benefit of the business world: the capacity to create new market space that is uncontested”.

Initially, when I started playing this game, I was continuously attacking enemy installations for resources (oil and metal). But once I recollected many of the Blue Ocean strategies and Coopetition theory, I started searching for new resources (oil fields and metal deposits) and was able to expand resources much more quickly. It is amazing how many of these lessons I applied and practiced in the War Commander game. Business schools should make games like these mandatory part of the course material.

I will write a lot more about Coopetition, Competitive Strategy, Blue Ocean Strategy and Business Strategy in next few weeks. My main goal for this blog was to highlight that business schools that focus a lot on theory, could benefit by incorporating games like War Commander in their curriculum which provides a platform to practice many of the theories taught in class. Those of you who have read Sun Tzu’s (a military strategist from china, on of the greatest military leaders in history) book The Art of War will be able to apply many of those strategies in this game as well. If you have not read Sun Tsu, grab a copy from amazon and read if you plan to make a career in strategy.

A Tribute to Shakuntala Devi

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Google’s tribute doodle to Shakuntala Devi on her 84^th birthday today made me proud to be an Indian. I am sure a lot of young people from India have no idea who she is. Popularly known as the “Human Computer” she was a great inspiration to many Indians of my generation. Her talents earned her a place in the Guinness Book of World records in 1982.

I started disliking Google since they started spamming the world with Google Plus, their so-called Social Network (a.k.a graveyard). However today’s tribute made me find a newfound respect for them. Google seems to want their Doodles to serve as both a celebration and an educational tool, keeping people informed of characters and events of which they might never have been aware. Shakuntala Devi will certainly be remembered more fondly due their efforts.

We grew up reading her books on mathematics and puzzles in numerous novels. She published the first book in India on homosexuality in 1977, which was amazing given the conservative state of India and the world in general on the topic at that time. Arthur Jensen from the University of California, Berkeley, studied her and Jensen’s findings were published in the academic journal of intelligence in 1990. Her mental ability at arithmetic’s was unparalleled and unmatched by any one of her time.

The legend had received no formal education in mathematics. At the age of 10, she was admitted to first grade at St Theresa’s Convent in Chamarajpet. But her parents could not afford the monthly fee of 2 Rs. She was thrown out of the school after three months To cite an example, at the Harvard University she was asked to derive the 23rd root of a 201 digit number which she answered in five seconds whereas a computer took 15 seconds. The people assembled there were drawn to a standing ovation for her skill. Her brainpower made her world famous and she visited countries all over the world and wherever she went she astounded her audience.

While at Ratnam Residential Junior College, a colleague of mine name Sashidhar was our schools version of Shakuntala Devi. He could do arithmetic faster than it would take time for us to input the data into our calculator. When asked how he does it, he said he was trained in the Trachtenberg system of arithmetic, which makes the high-speed arithmetical calculations with a remarkable degree of accuracy possible. Jakow Trachtenberg (1888-1953) developed this system during the seven years he spent in Nazi concentration camps during World War II to keep his sanity.

I tried, all the mental mathematics techniques including the Mental Abacus, Vedic Mathematics, and Chisanbop (finger counting method), all to no avail. It just takes too much time to master them, but I appreciate those who have the patience to master them. Scholars, often on the humanities side, prefer to have as little to do with numbers as possible. But numbers, in my opinion, are a part of life, so we better learn to live with them.

My favorite book by Shakuntala Devi is “Puzzles to Puzzle You” which I used while preparing for my software engineering interviews in India. People like Shakuntala Devi are few and her departure is literally a loss for the world. 

Field of Marketing

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I sat down, ready to write down my thoughts on marketing. Thirty minutes later I could not come up with anything original. There is nothing which has not already been said by Mr. Philip Kotler. For those of you who do not know Philip Kotler, he is unofficially known as the “father of Marketing”, the first person to receive the “Leader in Marketing Thought” in 1975, and placed 4^th in the “Most Influential Business Writers/Management Gurus” category.  His book Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Control is the most widely adopted book in business schools around the world today.

Marketing is both an art and a science. The science aspect of marketing (also called formulated marketing) is easy to grasp and most engineers who gravitate towards marketing tend to do well in this field. The artistic side of marketing requires a lot more creativity and takes a longer time to master. I have read almost every book written by Kotler accompanied by many other books on Marketing, and after four years in the field, I can say I have yet to feel 100% confident on the subject.

The average lifetime of a CMO or marketing executive is 18 months, which highlights the unpredictability of this job. Marketing is about increasing the perceived value of a product so that the buyer’s utility (perceived value – price a customer is willing to pay) is higher than the competitor’s product. This said, given the same quality, the buyer will purchase the product with the lowest price. It is part science, part art, and part a function of competitive landscape, which is a complex system dynamics model (competitive strategy, time delayed non-linear cause and effect relationship).

Buyer Decision process: The customer will choose product A over product B if (perceived value of product A – Price of A) > (perceived value of product B – price of B)

The job of marketing is to make sales irrelevant. People in Sales try to reduce the price to make the sale while Marketing is about increasing the price, therefore increasing the profitability of the product/company. Sales is transactional whereas Marketing is relational. Sales is about fulfilling need, whereas marketing is about creating need and increasing demand.

There is constant criticism about marketing and how it creates needs. However the book Principles of Marketing Management addresses this point well.  It suggests that needs are inherent to humans and cannot be influenced. Human  “wants” are something more closely tied to the product. Humans need food, but want a sandwich. Demand is something, which can be influenced by price and is about a specific product/brand. Customers demand subway sandwiches. This book argues that marketers’ influence wants and demands, but needs pre-exist marketing.

Marketing is one of the most versatile fields and I highly encourage and respect people pursuing it. But many people seem to be gravitating towards it with starry eyes and false hopes that it will be an easy field to conquer. I can promise you that this is not the case, marketing will end up being the toughest field you can choose as you grow into the leadership roles.

The reason Marketing is so complicated is because attributing the uplift in sales to a specific marketing campaign is not easy. At least not in the past, before the data driven marketing field gained traction. Also before the advent of Internet, it was much more difficult to directly correlate the influence of a marketing campaign to a specific sale. I will write a separate blog on attribution marketing later as it is a large field within itself.

Another reason why Marketing is difficult is because a lot depends on the product value proposition and competitive landscape. Your products’ competitive landscape will dictate how easy or hard it is to differentiate the product and the position it will take in peoples mind. If you recall from your undergraduate marketing classes, marketing is about 5Cs (Marketing Strategy) and 4Ps (marketing tactics). It is the STP analysis (Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning) which connects the strategy to the tactics. The process of anticipating needs and defining a product which will address those needs and positioning it in the market at a price point where buyers will see the value of your product over your competitors in this hyper competitive world is a very difficult task.  Most of the time, Marketing is brought in very late in the product life cycle, a few months before the product launch rather than from the very beginning of the product development process. By this time the product has already been defined and built and it is too late for marketing to conduct a customer feedback study and influence the product development. We as Marketers are asked to create a marketing campaign for a product, which might not have been completely validated, or value proposition hypothesis tested. Sales is looking to marketing to provide the leads, and senior executives are breathing down your neck for demonstrating the ROI (return on investment) on marketing spend, while also looking at the sales number to see the impact of marketing budget. This field is no child’s play.

There are two types of marketing roles prevalent in the Silicon Valley. Product Marketing and Field Marketing. Product Marketing is about communicating the product to the world (3 of the 4Ps – price, placement and promotion, while product management is about product features, 4^th P). As a Product Marketing Manager you are responsible for product launch including online marketing campaign. Field Marketing is about mostly outbound marketing including attending and publicizing at conferences, trade shows and events. It is about press release and building strategic partnerships. In my opinion Product Marketing is the toughest part of the job, but I am no expert and it depends on how the role is defined in a specific company. Most companies combine Field and Product Marketing into a single role, while others spilt them. The two roles should be divided but more on this later.

Model Thinking

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My previous blog on “Model Thinking – The Fox and the Hedgehog” discussed the differences between the Hedgehog’s and the Fox’s style of cognitive thinking and decision making. In this blog I am going to talk a little more about why we should study models. In upcoming blogs I will talk about sorting vs. peer effect model and also 2x2 model which helps with decision making during issues involving competing choices.
 
So why study models?

We study models to become more intelligent citizens of the world, understand data and patterns around us, and get our logic straight during a decision process. We watch the world around us and try to make sense of it. As human beings we are wired to rationalize everything and find patterns. I highly recommend reading the book “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb is a Philosopher who has spent the better part of his post investment banking career and life studying problems of uncertainty, probability, and knowledge. His three books: Antifragile, The Black Swan, and Fooled by Randomness are must reads for leaders and decision makers who have to deal with real life decisions under uncertainty in their day to day lives. The book argues that luck is often mistaken for skill, but I have my own opinion about it, which I will reserve for a future blog.
 
The human brain abhors randomness. ­­The key point of the book is that the patterns seen on charts or in life is nothing more than figments of our own imagination. It is called Apophenia, which is seeing patterns in random or meaningless data. Humans have the tendency to seek random patterns within information in general, such as with gambling, love, and religion. This argument might seem in contradiction to Machine Learning and the Big Data Analysis theory which is about finding patterns in large data, but it is in fact not. Machine learning algorithms find patterns when they exist, which makes these valid. For example the price of the house is linearly proportional to the square feet of the lot and construction. You can build a mathematical model or equation based model to find the correlation and hence the coefficients of linearity.
 
Our brains are wired to recognize patterns, whether they exist or not, like watching shapes form in the clouds which is also referred to as Pareidolia. We always feel the need to make sense of our surroundings and events around us. Sometimes, an ability to discern a pattern is very useful, but other times we simply fool ourselves into seeing patterns where there are none. We just can’t deal with arbitrary events. Perhaps, this is one of the reasons why quantum physics – random at its core – is so hard to understand. It is difficult for us to accept that at the core of our reality, there is nothing but uncertainty. I will write about a simple model called “Game of Life”, a one dimensional cellular automata model and also cover the “IT from BIT” theory in future blogs which will try to explain why it is so hard to infer what is going on at the micro level by looking at the macro level, and how complicated micro decisions can get in aggregation.
 
Even Einstein, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, could not accept it. He famously said to Neils Bohr, “God does not play dice!” To which Bohr retorted, “Quit telling God what to do!” In this blog I am going to discuss that models help us make sense of the world around us and that we can even build models which can help us understand the patterns.
 
There is famous quote by George Box where he says, “Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful”. Models do not give you nicely packaged answers for people who are looking for finality. They are the language of business, economics, academics, philosophy, psychology, and everyday life. Models help you be better at whatever you choose to do. Different models are applicable in different contexts. For example Game Theory is the study of strategic behavior between individuals, companies, and countries.
 
Models help us become intelligent citizens of the world. To understand segregation between high and low income groups or segregation between different races in parts of cities, it is important to understand models. For you to become involved in a conversation, it is important that you can use and understand models, because models tie us to the mast of logic. Formal models are better at both calibration (how accurate the model is) and discrimination (how fine the predictions are – instead of just saying cold or hot, predict whether it is 80 degrees or 90 degrees).
 
Models make us think clearly. In any complex event like gambling, stock trading, or horse racing people who use models do better. Models weed out logical inconsistencies and help us think about the consequences of our actions.
 
Models also help us understand data. There is, what data scientists’ call, a hair ball of data, of which there is no way our mind can make sense of it. There is no way to untangle patterns from this data without models.
 
Models can help you understand why a certain movie in a theater receives a standing ovation, while others don’t. They help you understand the Arab Spring revolution which overthrew dictators in Egypt and Libya. They help you understand economic growth, and peer effects (why a group of people who hang out together generally look alike, act alike and think alike). They help you understand how people around you affect you (You change your behavior to match others around you), and as in the case of Colonel Blotto’s model it helps us decide how many resources to allocate across different fronts in a war.
 
Models are built for one purpose and we can apply them to many other purposes to help us become more engaged people out there in the world. When we construct models, we get pretty interesting unexpected results.
 
There are two types of models.
1. Equation based models or linear models (e.g: y=ax+b). These are easy to model and simple ML algorithms can help find patterns and analyze causality.

2. Agent based model: These models have three parts:
    · A bunch of agents – people, firms, countries, organizations which are called objects of the models
    · Agents have certain behaviors or they follow certain rules. These rules could be optimal rules (rational choice model - Individuals are doing optimal things in the given context) or irrational rules (where they are not optimizing, but rather following simple rules).
    · Then finally, the outcomes. What kind of outcomes can we get? We may expect agents following certain behaviors to have correlated outcomes, but when you work through the logic, the opposite is true sometimes.
 
A blend of formal models and experience is what gives the best results. Smart people use models, but models don’t tell them what to do. Models make us humble. If you lay out all the logic we realize we had no idea what was going to happen. They help us see the full dimensionality of the problem. People with lots of formal models do better than people with one formal mode. If you want to be out there helping change the world in useful ways, it is really helpful to have some understanding of models. We have a moral obligation to leave a better world for the mankind after us than the one which was handed to us.

Customer Development and Product Development Organization

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My previous blog was about building a successful product which your customers will love. I define a successful product as one which is valuable, usable, and feasible. Valuable, making the customer want to pay for it. Usable implies that in the result of their purchase, the user has a good experience while using the product. Feasible implies that the product can be built within a reasonable time and within budget.
 
I highly encourage everyone to read Steve Blank’s book “The Four Steps to the Epiphany”. This book along with Eric Ries’s book “The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses” are must reads for any Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Steve Blank is a Silicon Valley serial-entrepreneur and academician who is recognized for coming up with the Customer Development methodology, which launched the Lean Startup movement.
 
One of the key points Steve Blank’s stresses in his book is that most companies ignore the customer development process until after the product development phase when it might be too late to modify the product to fit the market’s needs. This is a big topic in and of itself and requires a dedicated blog. I am going to mostly focus on the Customer Creation and Company Building phase of the customer development process.
 

 
So again, the main tenant is to focus on customer development parallel to product development. During the first two phases of the customer development process you are mostly focusing on problem-solution fit- using what I call the product discovery process, defining an MVP and validating the product in the market by testing product-market fit, and discovering the business model and creating a go-to-market strategy. The combination of my previous blog and the blog “Product Management Approaches - New Product vs. Existing Product” should give you a good idea of these concepts. I do understand that I am skimming over these and will try to address each one of them in individually dedicated blogs in the future. But more than that, I highly recommend grabbing the book “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” and giving it a quick read. It is a long book, but there is 30 pages of abstract that you can read online if you want to get a quick understanding of the concepts.
 
The stage where most startup founders falter is in the Customer Creation and Company Building phase of the customer development process. The skills required to succeed in these phases are different from the earlier phases. When you are still figuring out the product and market fit you are mostly adopting an approach of “start-fire-aim”, but now that you have discovered and validated a customer and discovered a repeatable sales process, you need to start focusing on building the business. This phase of defining business processes and creating a company is what most startup founder’s dread, because it goes against their no process system.. Business processes have gotten a bad reputation due to an over emphasis in large organizations and its tendency to promote bureaucracy.
 

The lack of having a process works when you are a small startup company still discovering the market, but once you have customers coming in faster than you can handle, you can’t expect to be on top of everything. It worked in the past, because you as a CEO had the time to micro-manage ever aspect of product and customer development process. While I recommend creating a business process to automate the product development and customer delivery/support of your product/business, I also recommend you not do it before this phase. It can limit what your product will become if you start defining processes too early during the product development.

 
To create a scalable business you need
· Process
· People
· Tools
 
So you need hire the following people to handle various aspects of the business
· Product Management group – Since you are going to be busy focusing on sales, meeting your key customers to keep them happy (in case of an enterprise product) or evangelizing (in case of consumer facing product), you will not have enough time to be thinking about the product, market, competition, trends and the roadmap

· Marketing group – You need a team or individual who can take care of both product marketing (blogs, social media, communication, product launch plan) and field marketing (events, conferences, out-bound marketing)

· Customer support group – Responsible for that 1-800 number and customer support website. This group is there to address your customer’s issues with usage of the product and also filing bugs into the product backlog to improve the future products

· Business Development group – You need dedicated people focused on lead generation, pre-sales, and closing the contracts

· Account Management/Partner relationship managers – If your product is enterprise focused you need account managers who can keep current customers happy and also expand the business through those customers.

· Architects – You hacked together a product. Good, but now you run into the issue of scalability, performance issues. You need to re-architect the solution until you get it right. Note, re-architecture is never really done. More on this in a future blog.

· Engineering management – Your startup has a lot of engineers. It is not possible for your technical co-founder to manage all of these engineers directly. You need middle ground managers who can manage various modules

· Program Management – You also need dedicated program managers to manage the execution of your product – managing schedules, reporting status, and removing roadblocks in the path to product delivery.

· UX design team – You need interaction designers, visual designers, and interface designers. Design, specifically interaction design, is something I am passionate about and I will write a lot more about it in future.

· Operations group – Someone needs to keep track of all the money that is coming in, that you are burning on salaries, and what needs to be paid out to your channel partners or affiliates. Operations workers keep the lights on.
 
I propose the following organization structure: Customer Development group run by Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Product Development group run by Chief Product Officer (CPO) both reporting to the CEO. Product Management group sits in the intersection between Customer Development Group and Product Development Group. I believe this would lead to the most organized and effective Customer and Product Development.