Introduction
“The largest distinction between constructing a highly-technical enterprise infrastructure product and a extra conventional SaaS product is that you simply’re not simply designing for human customers, you’re additionally making an allowance for machine customers,” says Nate Stewart, Chief Product Officer of Cockroach Labs.
The corporate is the creator of CockroachDB, a cloud-native distributed SQL database that’s designed to construct, scale and handle data-intensive purposes. (Because the founders put it, they named their startup after the resilient insect as a result of it’s practically inconceivable to take down — which is kind of the tall order for Stewart to reside as much as as a product chief.)
No matter who you’re designing for, with the tip of the 12 months quick approaching, annual planning is probably going high of thoughts — analyzing whether or not you hit your marks within the earlier plan and what would possibly information your work for the next 12 months. However the best-laid plans can simply stall when your technique makes its method off the web page and the rubber meets the street.
“In a market as massive as ours, there are completely different doable methods that may be profitable. Once we determined to focus our product technique on mission-critical, transactional workloads that target protecting information near customers, different possible methods opened up for our opponents,” says Stewart. “You begin to see clients whose characteristic requests you mentioned no to enter the arms of your opponents — and that may be demoralizing for those who don’t have conviction in your path and its long-term success.”
There’s so much written about startup technique and the way you should use OKRs to go from technique to execution. However there’s not a number of literature on the market about why some methods fail in the true world.
As product people begin sharpening up their annual plans, Stewart unpacks his playbook for gaining conviction and making a resilient technique that’s nonetheless standing this time subsequent 12 months. On this unique interview, he shares the failure modes for product leaders to maintain an eye fixed out for (like specializing in buyer high quality over amount), and the way he’s sidestepped these errors in his function at Cockroach (together with a brand new strategy to design companions).
Let’s dive in.
When a startup is simply starting to tread its path, it will probably appear to be there are seemingly limitless routes on the map to product/market match. Cockroach confronted an identical level of competition within the early days when deciding what to construct. “Databases work in each business and in many various use circumstances. As the primary Head of Product, I needed to put in place the processes for making choices round what to construct. What are the capabilities that we must always say sure to, and what are the options that we must always keep away from?” he says.
Even at first, you want a way of claiming no and filtering out the entire requests and potential use circumstances in your product.
So Stewart started trying on the alternative ways of segmenting the database market, eyeing the sting circumstances the place Cockroach would possibly slot in most naturally. This led the crew to a fork within the street, an early selection that will go on to be one of many defining choices for the corporate.
“We might construct a database that was an analytics system like Snowflake, that’s glorious at operating massive aggregations and doing computations throughout many rows of information. Or we might construct a database that was very performant when it got here to writing and studying transactional information,” says Stewart. “Essentially the most pure early resolution level was: What kinds of queries will we need to make Cockroach most performant for?” he says.
It’s a query that many product leaders have confronted within the early days: The place must you focus the ICP? “In the end, the massive resolution that we made was to concentrate on transactional use circumstances — as a result of the factor that makes CockroachDB distinctive is the product’s resilience. In case your analytics database goes down for 2 seconds, that’s okay. You simply hit refresh and run the analytics once more. But when the database that’s powering your cost processing goes down for 2 seconds, you may lose hundreds of thousands of {dollars}. Our secret sauce is protecting your information on-line, up and operating, and near customers,” he says.
This drew the road within the sand that Stewart (and all different product leaders) are in search of as they start to sketch out the product roadmap. “Getting alignment with the founders and the income crew that we had been going to be a transactional database helped us say no to a number of issues that will push us nearer to opponents like Snowflake, and enabled us to say sure to issues that will construct upon our product’s power over an extended time period,” he says.
However, as Stewart places it, this was a controversial selection amongst the crew and the retelling of this story smoothes over a few of the sharper edges. “There have been some real-world pressures that made it troublesome to carry the road on this resolution to turn into a transactional database. On the time we had been pre-revenue and had some massive clients saying, ‘We’ll provide you with your first $100,000 or $200,000 — however provided that you construct out these analytical capabilities. It’s extremely onerous to say no to a startup’s first potential income sources,” he says.
To shore up conviction within the option to concentrate on transactional databases, Stewart fashioned shut design partnerships with potential clients. However right here, he notes a key distinction relating to constructing enterprise infrastructure versus different kinds of SaaS tooling. “Enterprise infrastructure patrons are usually extra conservative — by definition, the infrastructure is what helps some core enterprise course of. In case your infrastructure is unstable or goes down, your core enterprise can go down,” he says.
All informed, people weren’t precisely lining up the door to be early testers. “It wasn’t as straightforward as I anticipated to get folks to give suggestions on the beta software program — as a result of there was such an enormous engineering funding required for a brand new characteristic that wasn’t absolutely baked. It wasn’t actually price it to our clients to check originally — they simply needed the product to work,” says Stewart.
And whereas most people need the newest tech— the latest iPhone launch, or the brand-new automotive mannequin off the lot — with enterprise infrastructure, patrons are inclined to take the alternative strategy. “When our clients had been buying the software program, they didn’t need the newest and best. They needed it to be six months or perhaps a 12 months behind,” he says.
So an already lengthy product suggestions loop was stretched even additional. “A number of the suggestions that we received from our clients was primarily based on choices that we made a 12 months in the past — which signifies that you’re driving by the rearview mirror,” says Stewart.
So the Cockroach crew leaned closely on dogfooding the product within the early days, even when it wasn’t fairly so elegant. “There was some extent the place I insisted that the entire product analytics had been achieved on the CockroachDB database. CockroachDB shouldn’t be an analytical dashboard, however it was a method for us to see what the SQL interface was like and the way straightforward it was to get information out and in of CockroachDB,” says Stewart. “Initially a few of these dogfooding alternatives had been a little bit contrived, and albeit fairly painful, however it was vital for us to check the perimeters of the product and paid large dividends in a while.”
However the transition from dogfooding together with your inner customers to placing your product out in the true world could be a sizable leap. That’s the place design companions can assist cushion the autumn. However quite than strategy design partnerships in a standard method, Stewart tried a special strategy. His recommendation to different product leaders going through comparable headwinds is to bucket your design companions into completely different classes so to de-risk particular features of the enterprise.
Strategic Design Companions: “With these people, we actually talked about the place we thought the database market was going. What had been a few of the macro issues that folks had been experiencing and the pains that their group was going by?”
Roadmap Design Companions: “These had been folks offering suggestions on the precise roadmap and the capabilities that we need to add to the database. For instance, it was clear over time that if persons are putting in a mission-critical database, they need it to plug into the remainder of the group and ideally ship updates to different programs in real-time. So we talked about including a real-time information streaming functionality to the roadmap — there was a number of pleasure round that concept and these design companions helped us de-risk the potential and the engineering funding it will take to construct.”
Characteristic design companions: “That is essentially the most troublesome design partnership, which is getting suggestions on specific options and getting engineers to attempt to use them. These are the design companions who really feel essentially the most ache that your product can clear up. For instance, we had an early buyer that was doing a major quantity of cost processing, and all of that processing was occurring in a single information heart. If that information heart went down for any purpose, whether or not there was an operator error or one thing out of their management like an earthquake or an influence surge, their enterprise can be utterly offline. They needed to get outdoors of a single area and construct a extra resilient system. They had been prepared to take a position a few engineers to be sure that what Cockroach constructed would assist them on that journey to a cloud-native structure.”
MBA-style experiences about market measurement are nice. However while you begin to see the conviction out of your design companions, you get an image not simply academically of how large a market is — you begin to really feel it viscerally. It’s a little bit artwork and science.
Notably within the early days, when the product roadmap is a bit squishier and clients are fewer and much between, it may be tempting to decide to new options, within the identify of signing a contract. However from the start, Cockroach has made it extremely troublesome to commit options to clients. “When new product managers and new sellers be part of our crew, they’re typically caught off guard by our unwillingness to decide to constructing one thing for a selected buyer. It’s like getting a invoice by Congress,” says Stewart.
That is fairly uncommon within the early startup section — when plans are amorphous, commits are rather more widespread. “You possibly can say, ‘Hey, we don’t have product/market match but. So if a buyer can pay us income, we are able to decide to constructing options A, B and C.’ If you will get your first 500K buyer by buyer commits, that may materially change your run charge. However it additionally considerably modifications your agility. The chance value is large,” he says.
Buyer commits are tech debt for product groups. You restrict your flexibility — and what’s extra useful to a startup than the power to alter course rapidly?
He estimates that in his 5 years at Cockroach, they’ve made 5 or 6 buyer commitments complete. “That flexibility has been large as we’ve navigated the altering database panorama,” says Stewart.
Right here’s how the Cockroach crew decides which buyer commits make the reduce:
“The primary is that it needs to be one thing that we had been planning to construct in any case, or is in some way higher for the corporate than what we had been in any other case planning on doing. The shopper commits are roadmap accelerators, not detractors.”
“We have now to grasp the answer from a technical viewpoint — do we now have the engineering crew and the important thing companions vital to simply accept the dedication?”
“There needs to be an enormous reward on the different finish. We have now to know that if we construct this characteristic, the prospect will turn into not only a buyer, however somebody who will deploy and develop their utilization with CockroachDB immensely.”
Stewart additionally flags that if consumer requests are arising over and over, you’ve received to start out digging deeper with the go-to-market movement.
The request for buyer commits is an fascinating indicator that you could be not have product/market match or you have got a misaligned GTM.
“If the gross sales crew is feeling like they need to stretch, this can be a likelihood to have a look at your complete GTM perform. Do they not know easy methods to place the product? Or are they not seeing the kinds of clients within the pipeline that they anticipated?” he says. “You additionally need to dig into the gross sales incentives, which are usually extra short-term centered. What does this deal imply for somebody’s quarter or somebody’s 12 months? They might be making a dedication that they don’t need to take care of the longer-term impacts. You need to be aware of that, particularly while you’re within the enterprise house with a bigger gross sales crew.”
One of many greatest tripwires that Stewart sees, significantly for resource-and-manpower-strapped startups, is that folk dream large relating to the technique — with out making an allowance for the true capabilities of the org. “You have got a few choices right here: you may have an sincere accounting of your crew’s capabilities, given your technique, and determine how one can shut the hole between the 2. Or you may determine that that is the crew you have got, and determine a technique that this present crew can execute,” he says.
There have been just a few inflection factors in Cockroach’s journey the place Stewart has confronted this precise predicament. “This was a problem we skilled straight as we began transferring into extra of a SaaS product by delivering CockroachDB as a service, the place our clients don’t run the database themselves — we run the database for them. There was a macro pattern pushing extra folks to dump their operations to distributors, and it had turn into more and more clear that we wanted to supply CockroachDB as a service,” says Stewart.
So his subsequent query is one thing he suggests that every one product people ask themselves repeatedly when crafting any type of technique:
What must be true for this technique to achieve success?
“The very first thing that we realized is that our clients had been having hassle hiring these database operators — however now we need to discover a option to rent them. And these website reliability engineers aren’t going to simply run one database, they’re going to run 1000’s of them. How do we discover these SREs? How will we interview them? How will we combine them into our tradition and make them profitable? If we determine to pursue this technique, it’s an enormous functionality that we now have to construct out,” he says.
Stewart sketches out one other instance of how your technique must leap off the web page. “We’re within the enterprise of dealing with mission-critical cost ledger information. If we’re asking folks to belief us with that information, we have to construct a considerable safety skillset. So we now have to rent safety specialists on the product and engineering aspect to assist us pull that off. In the event you’re not very particular about outlining all of the completely different contingencies together with your chosen technique, your technique will fail,” he says.
There’s an oft-repeated startup adage that competitors doesn’t matter — simply preserve your head down, and don’t get too distracted by what people round you’re doing. Stewart has been caught up on this mantra however has since modified his tune. “I initially thought that competitors didn’t matter. Simply concentrate on the purchasers, work by first rules, and also you’ll find yourself in an excellent place. However relating to touchdown an enterprise sale or going by an intensive analysis course of, it’s inevitable that opponents are concerned. It’s helpful to grasp the place your opponents are robust and the place you’re robust, and easy methods to speak about these differentiators in a method that favors you,” he says.
So relating to crafting firm technique, preserve your opponents in your peripheral imaginative and prescient. “We have now a category of opponents which have made basically completely different strategic choices than us. For instance, Amazon Aurora is a good database. Relatively than make your complete database cloud-native, they’ve made simply the bottom degree cloud-native. For them, that’s a strategic selection as a result of it means it’s a a lot less complicated migration to take an present database and run it on Amazon,” says Stewart.
“The factor that’s in our favor is that these databases aren’t all cloud-native, so that you don’t get the identical resilience traits. You possibly can’t transfer your information anyplace on the planet, and you may’t scale to the identical degree as you may with CockroachDB — that’s a elementary trade-off,” he says. This key differentiator then arms the gross sales crew with the messaging they should place the product to win clients.
When you consider the strategic investments that you would be able to make, put money into the core differentiators that set you other than opponents.
As Stewart places it, he leads his product groups like a product working system: “Product Managers are taking exterior inputs from the market — what clients are saying and what opponents are doing. They’re additionally taking inner inputs, like suggestions from the gross sales crew and what pre-sales and post-sales people are speaking about. They’re distilling all of that info by the lens of a technique after which determining the ways in which we would change or improve our product to maneuver us nearer to our mission,” he says.
The questions that come up at this stage embody:
How deeply will we perceive the issue?
How can we higher body the issue?
Danger-adjusted, is that this an excellent funding for the corporate, given the engineering value?
If we add one thing to the roadmap, one thing must fall off. Are we okay with the trade-off?
As these options begin to come to fruition, how will we de-risk them?
However these choices can’t occur in a vacuum — that’s the place your cross-functional companions are available in. Stewart recommends constructing out product councils to assist combine these insights from throughout the corporate. A product council is a month-to-month enterprise assessment, the place a PM for a selected product space will sit down with a cross-functional group of stakeholders to speak about how issues are going. “It’s a course-correction and information-sharing mechanism that we now have month-to-month within the context of this broader annual plan,” he says
Right here’s Stewart’s step-by-step information to conducting a product council:
1. Relatively than making a deck or offering a rating card, write a six-page narrative round what’s working and what’s not working.
2. Deliver 7-10 folks from throughout the org into the assembly.
3. Put aside one hour for the assembly; start the primary 20 minutes by letting folks individually learn by the memo and add their feedback.
4. The product supervisor then pulls out the principle themes, questions and dialogue factors, that are debated for the rest of the assembly.
Stewart warns towards making this assembly an open invitation. “The extra folks you have got within the room, the less persons are prepared to lift their arms and say one thing. Strike the stability the place you have got illustration from pre-sales, post-sales, help, engineering, product administration, design and advertising. However don’t open the floodgates.”
Like most startups, Cockroach has gone by just a few completely different permutations throughout Stewart’s tenure — and he’s been driving these waves, too. “After I joined Cockroach it was an open-source firm. Then we began commercializing — that’s a special enterprise. Then we began transferring into managed providers — that’s a special enterprise. Now, we’re in product-led development mode,” he says.
Right here’s his recommendation for different org leaders seeking to keep afloat with equally shifting tides: “If somebody joins a brand new firm and so they report back to the CEO as a useful skilled, it’s unlikely that the CEO goes to have the ability to coach them on easy methods to do effectively in that perform — that’s why they’re employed to be the useful skilled. You want to have the ability to take a tough take a look at the place you’re succeeding and the place you’re not on a reasonably common foundation,” says Stewart.
Listed here are just a few techniques he’s leaned on to do exactly that:
Create peer networks. “Join with different people who find themselves operating product groups at akin levels. What are the challenges that they’re going by? What’s their recommendation for navigating comparable conditions?”
Discover your function. “When you’ve got a visionary CEO and that individual is in search of an operator product chief, don’t attempt to be the visionary product chief and combat with the CEO on the imaginative and prescient. What’s your ‘higher collectively’ story with the CEO? How are you going to assist them obtain their imaginative and prescient, present a sounding board, or maintain up a mirror when one thing could be working? It’s essential to grasp what function it’s good to play to help your complete enterprise.”
Faucet traders. “One of many issues that I did very early on was I had a dialog with a few of our traders round failure modes they’ve seen for various Heads of Product in any respect kinds of firms. What are the issues that I ought to be taking a look at now to get forward of the abilities that I have to construct to achieve success as Cockroach continues to develop?”
And his remaining piece of recommendation for startup people up and down the org chart is to get very particular about asking for suggestions. “I request very candid suggestions from my friends about the place I’m falling brief, given their vantage level. Individuals have alternative ways they like to present suggestions. Some favor a cellphone name, others need to take a second and write down their ideas, so I’ll share the assembly agenda forward of time with the areas by which I’m in search of suggestions. Understanding somebody’s communication norms is useful for getting actionable suggestions,” says Stewart.
However whatever the format, it’s what you do subsequent that issues most: “In the event you ask for suggestions and also you get defensive, it’s impossible that you simply’re going to get the identical degree of suggestions sooner or later,” he says.
What I’ve discovered is that it’s not essentially the way in which you ask for suggestions that issues. It’s the way you present up while you obtain that suggestions that will increase your probabilities of getting high-quality insights.
This text is a lightly-edited abstract of Nate Stewart’s look on our podcast, “In Depth.” If you have not listened to our present but, make sure to test it out right here.
