Great founders lead with product strategy

Indeed, strategy is often overlooked or taken for granted, even though a startup cannot succeed without it. Strategy is the life blood of a company, more than product or market or customers. The two main questions of a startup are “what product should we build?” and “how can we get customers?” The answers to both these questions are derived from strategy. Without strategy, a startup has no direction.

Successful founders take a militaristic approach to product, growth and competition. They think more than “one move ahead.” They ask questions like, “where do we want this feature to take us?” and “how does this feature set limit or expand our future options?”

Business is like chess, in the sense that each new decision branches from the results of previous decisions. Strategy is anticipating and planning for what branches will exist or not exist as a result of a decision made today.

Why must this quality be present at the founding table? I work with small businesses (<50M revenue) who have software needs to better connect with customers. The company leaders and stakeholders have successfully grown a business through a combination of hustle, good fortune, and retaining productive employees.

Growth problems occur as the business scales and decisions inevitably favor the shortest possible path to a better solution, however small, and with little regard to the long term. Balancing the long term with the incremental iterations is the holy grail of strategy. It takes a blend of industry expertise, the sales funnel, and the right software abstractions that solve cross-cutting problems.

Most founders know the first two very well, but the last one is difficult to crack. It requires sound architectural knowledge of the current system, along with a curious interest of how the rest of the company works. The lines of code need to be secondary to the human side of the business. This is a rare find.

Great founders find a way to fill this role. Sometimes they land a great hire, but other times they find a trusted consultant, and keep the vision flowing from the top.

I hope more software engineers start to recognize the value in the knowledge they have, and shift their focus on how to maximally _apply_ it, instead of waiting for a requirements document and acceptance criteria.

Apart from having it in a document we found it useful to also have it in slide decks https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/11/from-dev-to-devops/ slideware with prototype screenshots https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vS3rvGVCoRPD... and video demo's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RcsO83xFw&t=1s

I'm in this exact situation right now (recently funded company, scaling out, increasing confusion from the implementation team about overall vision/strategy/direction because everyone is so busy) and ultimately came to this same conclusion.

We'll be setting up dedicated screens for everyone to see that lay out at a high level our sales pipeline, our product development initiatives and how those two things intersect and where our gaps are. A few members of our leadership will be holding seminars every month or so to cover competitors, potential partners, market history, etc.

We'll see how it goes.