July 21st, 2020
Last week, we invited three B2B tech-startups in the Venture Lane community to participate in our first product lab. How does it work? Participants shared their most pressing product dilemmas with an expert mentor committee. We were joined by: Tim Buntel, the chief product officer at CloudZero; Yael Avidan, the chief product officer at Jebbit; and, Todd Chapin, the director of UX at Pillo Health.
RELATED: Introducing the Venture Lane Sales Lab
Key Takeaways
- Be careful when it comes to following your gut feeling as it can be misleading. Instead, always use metrics for validation. Just because one customer told you XYZ, doesn’t mean they speak for all customers. Implicit assumptions should be avoided!
- Build what you need. Don’t build anything else and don’t try to fix something that isn’t broken.
- What is the most important pain you’re trying to solve? EVERYTHING you build should follow this prompt.
- Always engineer for observability. When it comes to data collection, build visibility into observability today so it’s more usable in the future when you’ll actually utilize that information.
- Instead of meeting about weekly product learnings, consider using Loom. You can share best practices for sharing product-related learnings with small startup teams by sharing your screen and recording your voice as you walk through your deck. Try to save time when possible – life is too short for weekly updates.
- It’s worth it to spend time quality thinking about evaluation and choosing the right success metric for your product. What is the overall goal of the business? Once you know this, determine what the steps are to measure the success. Make sure you’re tracking the results in the most economic way possible. After that, think about how the product needs to be adjusted.
Big thank you to our product lab mentor committee for dedicating a few hours out of their busy weeks to help early-stage startups in Boston.
