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Explaining Startup Challenges to a 6 Year Old

Product Management Challenges for Homemade Lemonade

Image: Unsplash-Charity Beth Long

I was once asked to think about how I would explain some of the startup challenges faced by a product business in a way that a small child would understand. I decided to use an analogy about making and selling lemonade – something I hoped everyone could relate to as so many of us had these little entrepreneurial ideas when we were children.

So hear goes, …

  • Imagine one day that you are playing happily in your garden with your friend. You are both thirsty so you grab a refreshing glass of homemade lemonade from the house. Your friend thinks it is the best lemonade they have ever tasted. You’re eager to make some pocket money. So you decide to ask your parents to give you some money to buy ingredients so that you can make more of it and sell it from a stall in your front garden. They are a little sceptical but they like your passion and drive so decide to invest!
  • You setup a little stall and your friends who live next door come and buy your delicious lemonade. You love spending time chatting with your friends and you are delighted that they love your new lemonade and are happy to pay you some money for it!
  • You quickly spend the money you have made and are eager to make some more. You know that there must be more people who would love to buy your lemonade! You just don’t know where they live, how you are going to tell them about your stall and how you will get them to come and buy some lemonade. 
  • You ask your friends, who have already bought the lemonade, to tell their friends and this does help to bring more people to your stall. You put a sign up in your garden to attract passers by.
  • Although you have more people who want to buy your lemonade, they all have ideas about how you might change the lemonade to suit their tastes a bit better. Some think that you should add some fizz, some want it sweeter and others just want it to be cheaper. You end up spending lots of time in the kitchen trying to do everything they are asking for. You no longer have any time to spend on the stall talking to your friends and customers. You now have to ask another friend to help you sell the lemonade – they of course want a share of the money you make.
  • The more customers you have for your lemonade and the more you try to please your friends the busier you become. You have made so many changes to your recipe that it is no longer quite as delicious as it once was. You forget that the reason everyone came to your stall at the start was the delicious recipe you made for your friend in the beginning. Some of your old customers are not happy with the changes you have made and stop coming to the stall.
  • Making lemonade takes a lot of your time and it is beginning to cost you and your parents a lot of money. By the time you give money to your parents for the ingredients and to your friends helping you on the stall there is very little money left over each day.
  • What started as a way to make a little pocket money has now made you so busy that you don’t have time for anything else! You have to ask more friends to help you in the kitchen but they all want a share of your small profits.
  • You are spending more and more time making lemonade and less time talking to the people who buy your lemonade!
  • One day, one of your friends talks to some of your customers in the queue for your stall. They realize that these customers are complaining about how warm your lemonade is! It has been left sitting in the sun. Your friend, jealous of your success, decides to setup a stall of their own. They use your original recipe but with one simple change – they add ground ice to the drink before serving. Your customers are curious and they head over to their stall to try it. They love it, the weather is hot and so they decide to buy from your friend’s stall instead.
  • You realize you were too busy in the kitchen to see this happen!
  • In order make sure your friends keep coming to your stall you now decide you would need to buy an icemaker. You ask your parents for more money and they agree to help you buy the icemaker.
  • But … it is coming into winter and the kid on the other stall has been watching her customers and realizes that they are no longer as interested in the cold lemonade. She chats with her friends as they play outside and she decides that hot chocolate will sell a lot better than cold lemonade in the winter. She quickly changes her stall and whatever customers you had left all decide to visit her stand for her lovely hot chocolate.
  • Your parents are fed up, they have an ice-maker in their kitchen that is not being used and they are not prepared to give you any more money. By the time you have paid all your friends who have been helping you make lemonade in the kitchen you have no money left over to buy the ingredients for hot chocolate or any other great idea.
  • You realize too late that if you had spent more time outside with your friends and customers, instead of being stuck inside making lemonade, that you would have spotted that the weather was changing and that your customer’s needs were changing.
  • You have learned a big lesson but it is all too late – but you are just a kid so how were you to know!

Startup Challenges – so what are the lessons here?

As adults and business professionals we

  1. Understand the importance of recognising and protecting our competitive advantage.
  2. We know that it is really important to get out of the business and validate that we have understood our customer’s requirements.
  3. We realise that capitalising on the market segments we are best placed to serve is crucial.
  4. We understand that as a Product Manager, paying too much attention to the technicalities of making our product and too little time capturing insights from our target market is not a good idea.
  5. We know that it is really important to think clearly about the potential return on investing in any new product idea and not all ideas are the right idea.
  6. We know that our investors will require a return on their investment and won’t be willing to fund everything we do – we know we need to make money.
  7. We know this isn’t child’s play and startups are tough but rewarding when you are focused and clear about what you are doing and why.
  8. We know we need the right people around us and we need to reward loyalty and hard work.
  9. We understand that goals may need to change when circumstances change but we know why we started the business in the first place and we know that our customers are our lifeblood so we have to stay close to them.

A 6 year old can’t know all that … they just like making lemonade!

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Helping Companies to think proactively about the “Paradox of Choice”

Why Market Segmentation and Prioritisation is Crucial

Paradox of Choice Market Segmentation Market Prioritisation
Paradox of Choice

I have been working as a consultant in Strategic Marketing and Product Management for many years now. I work with clients who are not just from the technology sector but from across a broad range of industries. I am seeing a common thread across many of these clients – the paradox of choice! How can market segmentation help?

Generally, as I start each engagement, we undertake a short capability assessment so that we can explore together where there may be gaps in the the company’s approach to what I call strategic marketing or commercial product management.

Invariably, when we chat about where they have challenges, and reflect on the capability assessment that captures all team members inputs anonymously, one of the key areas that is highlighted almost every time is lack of market focus.

Whether it is a startup or a more established business, they often are adhoc or scattergun in their approach to where they will find market opportunity.

What is a Paradox of Choice?

I have rarely come across a company that has not been relatively clear in describing the product or solution they have created. What they tend to be less clear on are the market segments that might benefit most from their product or solution. Generally, in each engagement I see one of two things happening:

  • The company has a product or service but they are struggling to align this with a clear need from a broad enough market base that will help them to drive meaningful revenue – i.e they have a product or solution looking for a market
  • The company has a product or service that could address many different market challenges across lots of different areas i.e. they are suffering from what I call a paradox of choice.

A paradox of choice might make us feel good because we think we have lots of opportunities to choose from. In reality having too many opportunities actually requires more effort. A lack of focus, jumping from one opportunity to the next and not targeting sales and marketing resources in the right way will not help us to maximise market opportunities that could be strategically very lucrative.

Why Market Segmentation Helps?

Taking time as a company to outline market opportunity and to assess this market opportunity through insight gathering and then through a prioritsation exercise can be hugely beneficial.

So who should perform this market segmentation and prioritisation exercise? In my view it is part of the role of a strategic Product Manager or a Strategic Marketer. The beneficiaries of this exercise are:

  • The CEO – they will have a way of aligning their strategic objectives (OKRs or KPIs) with defined market opportunities
  • Sales – the CEO can work with the sales team to assign realistic sales targets to validated market segments
  • Marketing – the marketing team can define compelling value propositions for each prioritised market segment and drive targeted marketing campaigns

In my experience, lots of companies avoid this activity because it does require some effort and focus and it does require some experience in doing it right. It is crucial to choose the right criteria to support segmentation, to implement market research to generate insights for decision making and to get buy-in from the full leadership team in prioritising market opportunity.

What are the consequences of not doing this?

From my experience, the key consequences of a lack of market focus are:

  • A sales team that are scattergun in their approach to revenue generation. Sales is an operational cost to the business and not ensuring that the sales team are focused and targeted at the right markets is a mistake
  • Revenue is coming from markets that are not really aligned with the strategic objectives of the business – perhaps leading to bespoke engagements to meet clients needs
  • Revenue is not being generated in a repeatable way from clients with similar challenges
  • Sales forecasting is really challenging as it is difficult to predict where market demand will come from

As a senior leadership team, take some time to help the business to achieve real focus by undertaking a market segmentation and prioritisation exercise.

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Real Leadership is Forged in a Crisis (Part 1)

This post has been co-authored with my business mentor and friend Steven Wikinson, founder of Good and Prosper

We met at the DCU Ryan Academy’s Mentoring for Scale – an initiative targeted at fast-growth entrepreneurs in the Dublin startup sector. We both act as mentors in these monthly breakfast speed-dating sessions, where each entrepreneur has 30 minutes to present their current challenges to three experts in succession and seek their advice. Each interaction is a high-concentration challenging engagement, with both the mentors and the mentee (business founders) needing to focus hard and respond fast to squeeze the most juice out of the morning.

We have spent a good many hours over the past two months bringing our experience and perspectives to bear in animated discussions around the current COVID-19 crisis and its consequential effect on consultants, business advisors and coaches – a subject close to our heart and of special relevance to so many now.

Our discussions have focused on a few questions around the consultant business model, charge rates and how consultants appear to be the worst culprits of not doing what they make a living from telling other people to do, often at great cost to their quality of earnings and life, not to mention their mental health and energy.

Between us we bring decades of experience of consulting with scaling businesses or supporting those business to capitalise on their “business model”. Together we want to capture what we believe to be timely and hopefully encouraging advice to professional consultants to help you to use this time of crisis to do what you so rarely do systematically – to

Invest in your business, nurture and care for your most precious assets and prepare for the upswing through regrouping, refocusing and re-energizing yourself

There could not be a better time!

The cobbler’s children have no shoes

There is a well-known aphorism which states that “the cobbler’s children have the worst shoes.”, in other words…

Those in a particular trade tend to be most neglectful of themselves and their requirements in respect of that trade

So… butchers get the scraps not the filet, fishmongers eat hake and not salmon, doctors never take health advice, bankers have the least money and …

Consultants rarely take the advice they are paid well to dispense to clients!

Sound familiar?.

We can prove the truth of this.

In a recent comprehensive study of SME businesses looking at profit margins across all industry groups from chemicals to consulting, it was found that the difference in profitability between the top 10% and the average (including the 10%) was a staggering 7x or 700% if you prefer a big number.

Nowhere has the discrepancy between the top performers and the average been as extreme as in the consulting profession …

The top 10% of consultants generate a 34% operating profit margin and the average earn a paltry 2.5% – a 15x or 1,500% difference

If you further imagine that the distribution of the “rest” of the consulting is not equal amongst the other deciles, you will, without straining your math’s brain cells too much arrive at the inevitable conclusion that most or at least a substantial proportion of those whose job it is to advise others on the betterment of their operations – from IT to strategy – are the worst at applying that advice to themselves.

Consultants rarely take their own advice, they complain of high levels of stress, exhaustion and a feeling of being prisoners of their own particular hamster wheel – how can we change?

Running hard to stay in the same place

It is undoubtedly true that consultants are (with a few exceptions) first and foremost helpers whose strongest wish is to be seen as an expert and specialist in their chosen field. They want to be respected for their experience, problem-solving skills and influence.

In reality though they often feel that they could and should be generating more revenue for the effort they are putting in and that the risk-reward balance is often not where they would like it. They dream (literally) of having their clients refer more business to them and of being able to focus on projects that are intellectually stimulating.

Our experience of consultants from our business networks, especially those working as solopreneurs rather than in partnerships or small consultancy practices, is that they are running hard just to stay in the same place and often find it hard to differentiate themselves in a crowded and competitive marketplace. Those who have not mastered the art of understanding their value and finding opportunities that maximise that value for clients, are often too busy chasing and delivering on small and large projects, to be able to concentrate or devote much attention to the medium and long term strategic development of their business.

It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one

Consultants, mentors and coaches are by default some of the smartest people around. They have to be. They are paid for their ability to parse actual situations into models of the world that they have thought deeply about and to recommend processes and courses of action which will result in positive outcomes and increased efficiency and efficacy for their business clients. They need to have command of both theoretical and practical knowledge and communicate complex interdependencies in understandable terms, as well as quickly filtering out the important from the irrelevant when taking over a brief to get to the heart of the matter.

So why do we struggle to apply rigorous thinking to our own business challenges?

We understand why doctors don’t operate on their own appendices (although we have heard stories of ones that have), but it seems counter-intuitive that consultants would not utilise a small amount of their own medicine to help themselves cure their own ills.

Those who see themselves as experts in their field may be unwilling to seek advice from people who they perceive would not know any more than they themselves do. Perhaps doctors are the last people to seek medical advice for their own ailments? Perhaps coaches, consultants and mentors are not willing to seek advice from those they see as peers?

However, we all know that speaking with someone who is who is not influenced by our sometimes long held biases or beliefs and who can give an impartial view of our situation based on their experience and expertise can be invaluable.

Sometimes we are oblivious to what is staring us in the face until someone else points it out

When we get into firefighting mode it can be difficult to find time and space for what is truly important vs. deemed to be urgent … from our anecdotal experience of dealing with other consultants, mentors and coaches we came up with the following Business Cycle Adjusted Excuse Profile

As you can see, there is never a right time to make room for important but not urgent work! Before the crisis hit you may have had plenty of projects and be seen to generate lots of revenue but were you really doing work that was aligned with your business vision? Were you achieving work life balance? Were you chasing every new opportunity without focus? As we move into crisis mode do you find yourself gasping for air – fighting to keep your business alive.

We all know that this crisis will pass – what excuses will we all come up with on the other side?

There can always be excuses related to time, money, energy or need – depending on where in the business cycle we happen to find ourselves.

A priori, these “excuses” are just that, they may be valid – for instance in today’s environment who could fault anyone for holding onto their precious reserves? Who knows how long this Covid-19 lockdown is going to last? Will there even be a consulting market for anyone to return to when it is eventually over?

Are these genuine concerns or are they just excuses?

Excuses just mean that serious, life altering change is kept firmly under lock and key…

If you do what you always do, you will get what you always got!

Madness: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result

Albert Einstein

This cycle will come and go. The valley – be it U, V, W, L or S shaped – will be traversed and we will emerge, possibly exhausted, but still fit for business, on the other side and begin the long (or maybe even short and steep) march to recovery. The question we ask – and not rhetorically – is:

What will individual consultants and coaches have done to ensure that the next cycle does not end the same way as all the previous ones have done?

Can we all grasp this opportunity to practice what we often preach?

Will we use this Covid-19 crisis to invest in ourselves so that we are fighting fit for the upturn and ready to grow our reputations as reliable, professionally competent business people who showed strategic foresight during the hiatus?

“Physician! Heal thyself”?

Please leave a comment and/or re-share on your networks – we would love to hear your thoughts on this.

  • Do you take your own medicine or do you resonate with the premise that the cobbler’s children have the worst shoes?
  • Are you using this time of transition to focus on realigning your strategy for your business or are you simply chasing every revenue opportunity that you can?
  • What piece of advice do you give your clients that you never take yourself?

We would love to share our collective experiences and generate greater insights that might help us all as consultants, mentors and coaches.

Siobhan Maughan (www.integratedthinking.ie)
Steven Wilkinson (www.goodandprosper.com)

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Product Management Festival – Zurich September 2014

Badge-03_SpeakerWas great to get the opportunity to speak at the Product Management Festival in Zurich this year. I presented on how portfolio management techniques could support corporate ideation – had some great conversations on the topic with other attendees after my talk and there seemed to be a lot of interest in the area of innovation.

It was fantastic to be part of a great lineup that included Ellen Gottesdiener, Rich Mironov, Teresa Torres , Michael Eckhardt to name but a few. It was also really great to meet so many European counterparts – so interesting to get their perspective on how product management is working in their organization.

The event offers great opportunities for Product Managers to network and is certainly not just about listening to speakers. It is really great to see an event focused on Product Management. Unfortunately I couldn’t get to all of the speakers but here were just a few short takeaways for me:

Michael Eckhardt – 7 Deadly Sins to Avoid

Don’t just talk to current customers – talk to mainstream customers who have not yet adopted your solution. Understand your customers compelling reason to buy. Ensure your messaging is clear – communicate a “superior selling proposition” – good template provided.

Thomas Bauch – Crossing the Strategic Gap with Product Portfolio Management:

Thomas walked us through some really useful tools in the area of Product Portfolio Management: 9-Array Matrix, Extended ABC Analysis, Project Value Contribution Index.

Gaurav Katyal – Gamification for Product Managers:

Gaurav helped us to recognize how gamification techniques could support other real world examples. Understanding what makes games engaging and how they motivate user behavior. How to drive user engagement of our products.

Teresa Torres – Moving Past Vanity Metrics:

Teresa presented a very insightful case study from a company where she worked previously in where they recognized that they were really capturing metrics that just made them feel better rather those that would really show if the product was successful. She encouraged us to “define product success in terms of when your user has success – not in terms of business success”. She also recommended “evaluating every idea, every decision based on expected impact on your goal”

IPTV Portfolio Funnel – Thomas Haas

Thomas reinforced the importance of  portfolio management techniques and he described how he applied this technique in an IPTV case study – defined criteria for prioritization that included cost of delay, duration and weighted the prioritization based on shortest job first (WSJF). Requirements prioritization is a key function of product management and good to see focus on this throughout the conference.

Nikolai Mokros – Product Management Training on the Job

Encouraged us to hold “Quick Product Management Intelligence” sessions on a weekly basis – no more than 30 minutes. Understand your “golden nugget” learning of the week – building up a suite of topics that can be accessed even by those who could not attend on the day – very useful idea.

Ellen Gottesdiener – Rope your Scope

Understand “what” you are building – the 7 product dimensions, “who” you are building it for – reign in your scope creep.

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Mentor and Support Companies Establishing a Product-Oriented Discipline

The Challenge

Many companies over the last few years have made the bold move to establish a product management discipline in their organization. They understand that to be successful they need to:

  • Create scalable and repeatable products or services that customers love
  • Continue to generate and prioritize innovative ideas
  • Ensure the organization is marching not only in the “right direction” but in the “same direction”
  • Work to a clearly defined business model that meets corporate strategic objectives
  • Prioritize and resource many projects, with a finite set of resources, whilst achieving maximum ROI

This requires someone to hold it all together and keep the company focused. As Steve Jobs said “You need a very product-oriented culture… lots of companies have great engineers and smart people. …there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together.”

Initially, when the company is small, the CEO or CTO will fulfill this role – but as the company begins to scale it is important that the CEO looks for support. Adding a product manager to the team is the right next step… but what exactly does this product manager do and how will they integrate with the existing team? Often there are a myriad of political obstacles that need to be addressed as people’s roles change and the organization settles into a new way of thinking.

The Product Management Dilemma

The new product manager has a myriad of functions that they “could do” – the question is what functions “should they do” that align best with the organization’s structure, vision and strategic objectives? Although there are many organizations that provide great frameworks to help product managers understand all aspects of their role, quite frankly the breadth and depth of areas to be covered would give any new product manager palpitations! You would need to be superhuman to address everything effectively! So, how do you decide which aspects of the framework make sense for your new product manager? How do you ensure that your new or existing product manager has the right level of domain expertise, can perform key aspects of the product management discipline, can communicate effectively and can earn the respect of engineering?

Addressing the Challenge with In-House Mentoring

Applying a product management discipline does not need to be an overwhelming challenge for a company.  I think it is best to start with a “lean” approach to product management – don’t overwhelm yourself and your new recruit from day one.

For many new and established product managers they exist in a state of constant bewilderment and despair as the enormity of the role becomes apparent to them. They often have a very unclear definition of the role, unachievable expectations are set by senior leadership or often no expectations are set at all (which is even worse), there is no clear prioritization of projects and they have to juggle the demands of a sales and engineering team who expect their undivided attention 24/7. This situation can become a cycle of despair where the product manager becomes increasingly disillusioned and the leadership team begin to dismiss the product manager as ineffectual.

Things do not have to be this way – understanding who does what in your organization and clearly defining the role and Org-Structure 2boundaries for each group is a first step. Then, applying a structure and discipline to product management that aligns with the stage your company is at is crucial. Helping the product manager to apply methodologies in areas such as portfolio management, value proposition creation, requirements management, agile development, customer validation, ideation, ROI analysis, sales management and leadership alignment will undoubtedly help alleviate the pressure.

As someone who has performed the role of product manager and ultimately managed both a portfolio of products and a team of product managers I understand more than most how to make this demanding role effective. I learned quickly that applying structure and discipline ensured myself and my team could work effectively.  We can all read books or attend courses that will give a good grounding in the product management discipline but the application of this discipline and the understanding of what works in reality comes with experience.

Don’t wait until either you or your product managers have reached the point of despair – seek the support and help of those who have done this before, who have been at the coalface and who understand the demands of the role.

 “Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.”  Eric Ries, The Lean Startup

Contact: Siobhan Maughan, IntegratedThinking (www.integratedthinking.ie)

Approved consultant with Enterprise Ireland – funding available.