A is where every product starts. You spend time developing without any customers using the product. B is where you launch the product and you discover how valuable it is. Jared puts it best when he says, “As the founder of a startup, the length of A (and the height of B) are crucially important variables that dictate how much money needs to be raised to de-risk the business in front of future financings, how to plan sales hiring, how to message to investors, etc.”
I think this is great, but we need a new chart to illustrate how vertical SaaS companies are currently developing. I currently work for a VSaaS company and we started by developing one product, but are now concurrently developing 4 products I think that is best represented by this chart below:
Product A is the first product you build. You develop it, launch it, and it is extremely well received. After a few quarters, you hear the need for an entirely new product, not just a feature. That is represented by line B. This new product could have an initial perceived efficacy, but you truly won’t know it until you launch it to customers and continue iterating. In most situations, the efficacy upon launch should be better than your first product. Why? You already have a customer base and you are able to build and workshop the product with these customers before launch.
In another scenario, you may see a shift in the market that convinces you that your company needs to build product C. In some cases, this decision pays off big, and product C is a hit. Realistically, there can be 10 lines on this chart. In that case, it then becomes the job of the executive team to decide where to devote the most time and effort.
Feature Prioritization
The other chart that I want to propose is one that dives deeper and looks into the iteration portion of the lines above. How do you decide what to build next within a certain product? The obvious answer is the one that is the least amount of work with the highest efficacy. In theory, that chart reads something like this:
The best place to work is obviously the top left. These features have high efficacy and take a relatively low amount of hours to complete. This segment should almost always be empty. The area right below it is generally going to take a few hours to complete, but sometimes it won’t yield a great reward when it comes to product efficacy. All in all, it really depends on where exactly the feature falls in this area. The top right is the hardest work with the highest reward. As the saying goes, “do hard things, get rewarded” (I think that’s a saying?). This work should constantly be in development, but only one or two features at a time should be worked on since there is a lot of hours required.
One note I'd like to add is that all this work prioritization depends highly on the goals of your product and company. Sometimes there is work that has marginal product efficacy but is huge for credibility/marketability, that is a judgement call that varies company by company. And the bottom right, yeah you probably shouldn’t touch many of these.
In a healthy product development org, the top left is 95% clear, the bottom left is 50% clear, the top right is about 75% clear (or in development), and the bottom right really depends on how many interns you have. In practice, it looks like this:
A proposal for additions to: a framework for modeling product development
Tom Lombardozzi
