Jack Litchfield’s Post

🚀 We launched a new product that scaled from $0 to over $30MM+ ARR in under 12 months. Plus, we launched two new products in unrelated verticals that reached millions in sales. How did we ship so fast and with such impact? Here's the secret: 🧵👇 The magic wasn't in the ideas, but in an organizational structure change. We adapted Amazon's Single-Threaded Owner (STO) model for modern startups and scale-ups. As we grew, functional organization slowed us down. Cross-team dependencies and disconnected team members were issues. I saw a lot of “create a Jira ticket, throw it over the fence, and pray an engineer gets to it” from the business teams and vice versa. We tried Spotify's guilds and tribes, but non-tech teams were left out. We pivoted to Amazon’s STO model for clear ownership and accountability, but it needed tweaks for startups. We didn’t have Amazon's resources, deep pockets or hundreds of engineers to throw at problems. Introducing Mission-Aligned Teams (MATs) - a hybrid of STO and functional reporting. MATs blend hardcore ownership with coaching and development at a fraction of the cost and resources required to run STOs. Here's why MATs worked: 1) Every MAT has a single mission and a single owner (MAT Lead) who is responsible and accountable. Clarity of focus and ownership is the most important part of this structure. 2) Most projects are MATs. If a project doesn’t have a clear MAT or single lead, it’s a no-go. We do not allow "side-hustle" projects. The best way to fail at something is to make it into many people’s part-time jobs. 3) MATs control their destinies with members from all functions including both tech and non-tech. No tossing Jira tickets over the fence, no RACI frameworks and no complex web of cross-functional dependencies. 4) MAT Leads have decentralized decision-making authority, allowing for clear prioritization and informed choices. 5) MAT Leads aren't people managers. They focus on mission and execution, while functional managers handle development and coaching. Neither MAT Leads nor MAT members have to be senior or unicorn talent. 6) Anyone can be a MAT lead, regardless of title, job level or tenure. MATs can be led by product, engineering, marketing, data, or business. 7) We offer standardized training and a MAT “bootcamp” to ensure a consistent execution framework. We can hire talent at any level and execute just as effectively. 8) MATs are flexible and can be spun up or down based on market needs. Leads and members can easily move between MATs. This lets us rapidly adapt to capture new market opportunities or double down on successful experiments. This structure made us fast and focused. We now ship winning products and grow talent from within. One of our million-dollar projects was led by a new-grad MAT Lead! Want to stay ahead? Comment or DM "I want to learn about MATs" and share this thread and I'll send a link to our MAT implementation template and guide.

The cost of building a digital product MVP has never been lower, and trust me, it will get even less expensive over time. If you’re building SaaS or an internal tool in 2024, and your goal is to maximize your chance of success, you have to squeeze in as many product iterations as possible until you reach a product-market fit. As simple as that: more tests = more answers from your early adopters = faster time-to-market What options do you have? You either have strong tech/business knowledge or need a consultant to help you determine whether you should go with custom software (like Elixir, Phoenix, and React Native in our case) or a no-code platform. The latter is where you really save money at this stage of development. Don’t get me wrong, not everything can be done with low code, and it may happen that you’ll reach a point where you’ll not be able to tweak your product exactly as you want due to limitations (the same goes for performance optimizations). But… I would lie if I said that in 2024, building digital products on top of a no-code platform is not a real option. Now, here is the tricky part. Depending on what you’re trying to build, the wrong choice may make or break your startup. Building MVP of Spotify in no code is not a good idea, and most probably, you will just burn cash. On the other hand, if your startup MVP is about tables and data - it can easily be done with no code. Before you start the development phase, you should first go through a product workshop. This is when you can determine what type of tech you need to build the MVP. Even though Curiosum specializes in custom software, we have no hesitation in advising you on the right tech solution for your problem, considering the budget. Book a free call here -> https://lnkd.in/d6zjPJ_p #nocode #customsoftware #mvp #prototyping

Tanguy Crusson has spent 10+ years at Atlassian, where he's taken several products from zero to one, including HipChat, Statuspage, and most recently, Jira Product Discovery. In this episode, we dive deep into the struggles and lessons of innovating and building new products inside a large company. Tanguy shares candid stories about what's worked, what hasn't, and everything he's learned about successfully building 0 to 1. We cover: 🔸 Why large companies with so many advantages still fail at creating new products 🔸 How to avoid common pitfalls like competitive myopia and premature scaling 🔸 Lessons learned from acquisitions 🔸 Lessons from competing with Slack 🔸 Insights from the success of Jira Product Discovery 🔸 Tactics for protecting your “ugly babies” 🔸 The power of “lighthouse users” 🔸 The importance of having a “why now” 🔸 So much more Listen now 👇 - YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gr9f4D45 - Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gmiuz944 - Apple: https://lnkd.in/gWGAc5ZX Some key takeaways: 1. “Don’t eat your own bullshit.” When launching new products within companies that have already seen some success, it’s easy to assume that your existing playbooks will work again. But what got you here won’t take you there. You need to define, test, and validate your assumptions, because they may very well be wrong—especially when targeting new customer segments. 2. Startups benefit from starving. Starving creates hunger, which drives people to solve problems with resourcefulness and urgency. When exploring new products in a big company with excessive resources, you need to create scarcity to emulate this startup starvation. This generally means operating as a small, scrappy, siloed team. 3. The most likely outcome when launching a new product is failure—even at big companies that appear to have many advantages. It’s important to ground new product launches in this reality so that you can deter the company from over-investing, which ultimately serves to reduce hunger, slow things down, and decrease the chances of success. After all, why invest heavily in something that’s most likely to fail anyway? 4. Success for new products should be measured differently from existing ones, both in terms of metrics and time horizons. In general, new products should be judged by whether the team is answering the right questions at the right pace and whether the team is still excited about the new bet’s potential. It’s a common mistake to judge new products by metrics that a big company is used to, like MAUs or revenue. However, if a team is optimizing for MAUs or revenue before they’ve worked to understand the problem, they will be working on the wrong things. 5. Atlassian uses a four-phase approach to launching new products and deciding whether to invest in them further: Wonder, Explore, Make, Impact

Unlocking the Power Sprints: Accelerating Your Business Growth. Sprints aren't just for athletes – they're a game-changer for startups looking to innovate, iterate, and grow at lightning speed. Here's how to harness the power of sprints like a seasoned pro: 1. Define Your Goal: Crystallise your objective before you hit the ground running. Whether it's launching a new product, refining your existing offering, or expanding your product range, clarity is critical. Take cues from Airbnb, who used sprints to revamp their user experience and propel their growth to new heights. 2. Assemble Your Dream Team: Surround yourself with a diverse mix of talent – designers, developers, marketers, you name it. Collaborate like crazy, drawing inspiration from Spotify, whose cross-functional squads drive innovation through relentless teamwork. 3. Embrace Rapid Prototyping: In the sprint world, it's all about getting your ideas out there – fast. Build prototypes, gather feedback, and iterate like there's no tomorrow. Just ask Slack, whose iterative approach transformed workplace communication as we know it. 4. Fail Fast, Learn Faster: Not every sprint will end in victory, and that's okay. Embrace failure as a stepping stone to success, learning and adapting with each iteration. Look to Dropbox, whose early setbacks paved the way for revolutionary cloud storage solutions. 5. Stay Agile and Adaptable: In today's fast-paced landscape, agility is non-negotiable. Keep your finger on the pulse, responding swiftly to market shifts and customer needs. Take a leaf out of Uber's playbook, constantly evolving its business model to stay ahead of the curve. So there you have it, folks – a crash course in sprinting like a startup superstar! Remember, the journey may be fast-paced, but the rewards are oh-so-worth it. #SprintToSuccess #InnovationNation #StartupStrategies

Successfully managing to grow a new SaaS product will, at first, feel like you've finally made it. But... it quickly leads to new challenges. 🫣 Like: How to grow your development team to handle scale and customer feature requests? It's a common challenge. Hiring more developers seems like the obvious move, right? More developers, more stuff out the door. But not so fast. Here's a curveball for you: You probably don't need to hire anyone. I was part of scaling Spotify for many years, and as a product lead I helped hire 100+ people across Product/Design/Development. Even when you have a strong brand and resources to pay competitive salaries, hiring is SLOW: - It takes weeks+ to find the right candidate - Then more weeks (or months) before they actually start - Then even more weeks to get them onboarded (during which time, they slow down other developers) For a startup needing to get more done, that's a very old school approach. Now, I'm telling you, there's a better way. What if you change HOW you work instead, so your existing team can be more effective? Since you've built your app from scratch and it's been scrappily put together, most likely you haven't had the time to invest in great developer tooling and workflows. With the latest generation of tools, the potential speed improvement is not marginal gains. It's possible to 3X delivery speed, and at the same time reduce bugs and improve scalability. New tools aren't just an improvement, they can be a real game changer for a growing startup. So before you hire anyone, think long and hard about what you can do to make your existing development team more effective. Start by asking your developers! 🤦♂️ Most likely, they already have a long list of grievances with the current workflow. But BEWARE. Not all tools will be impactful. At Encore, we've lived through these challenges. We've learned that to make a big impact, you need to focus on a specific problem. The same is true for tools! Among craftsmen there's a saying: "the right tool is half the job". It applies equally well to developer tools. That's why, at Encore, we've created something specific to one problem: Building Go based cloud backends deployed to AWS/GCP. It's the right tool for that job, and the impact is so significant that you won't believe at first. Imagine shipping a set of new services in minutes, using primitives like Pub/Sub, without any manual work setting up infrastructure. With no manual work re-jigging the local environment or test environment. Imagine re-deploying a resource intensive service to separate cloud, to make use of free credits, without changing any code or doing any infrastructure configuration. Imagine being able to onboard developers in 5 minutes, giving them a single command to run the whole backend locally with local tracing. That's Encore for you. Sure, call me biased, but speeding up development — without hiring — has never been this simple.

My hypothesis is that all of us product managers go through a similar experience when we release a new 'thing'. For the first 4-6 hours, it's pure euphoria. The feature is in production. We feel relieved, excited, and eager for feedback. We're proud of ourselves, our teams, and we believe this will change everything. The company will thrive. We’ve made an impact. We’re awesome. Then... Hour 6 hits. We start monitoring, analyzing. We notice all the things that didn’t make the cut. The feedback rolls in, and we want to dive in, fix, iterate. But the roadmap awaits. The next thing looms. Our satisfaction drops from a 10 to a 4, and just like that, we’re off to the next challenge. But this week was different. This time, the "thing" was a feature we co-created with Amazon, and it was announced on one of the biggest stages —at a conference with 5,000 attendees. The lights were bright, the music was loud, and the DJ was vibing. And right after our feature was announced, who walks out? Martha Stewart. Yes, our feature shared the stage with Martha Stewart! The excitement didn’t just last 6 hours—it carried on. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. When you join a startup, you don’t expect massive stages, famous DJs, Martha, or co-creating with Amazon… but it happened. It was an unforgettable experience and a huge milestone in my career. In that moment, I felt: 1. Immense appreciation for Carbon6— which is already changing the landscape of e-commerce and is seen as a trusted, innovative leader that Amazon can rely on to collaborate with. 2. Love for my team—Nate Held, who took the ideas behind the 'why' and designed a beautiful 'what', and my incredible engineering team who figured out how to make it all happen 3. Pure joy— my colleagues didn’t just see this as a win for Carbon6, but as a personal milestone for me. They sat beside me in that conference hall, making sure I felt supported—not just as a C6 employee, but as a friend. I am so grateful for the opportunity, grateful for my team, and deeply appreciative of that moment. I can’t wait for the launch of Amazon’s 3rd-party embedded experience and the massive impact it’s going to have on our Carbon6 sellers. Youssef Asaad Žiga Marolt Kevin Cho Alejandro Jose Carvallo @faraz Albert Farhi Zeshan Mahmood Brett McLaughlin and of course Shivika Khare & Hina V. ❤️

I'm seeing companies eager to "Work Backwards" Like Amazon, use the "Spotify Model", or otherwise copy Big Tech processes. While it's great to be inspired by the most successful examples, we should realize these companies are different from ours. Their playbooks may not work for us. Having worked for 3 Big Techs I can tell you there's a lot we can learn, but we shouldn't start with process. It's their culture, dev philosophy, and principles that make companies like Google, Netflix, or Apple magical. Here are a few principles that all great product companies employ: 1. Customer focus - Putting the customers at the center of everything is expected across the org -- from engineers to lawyers. 2. Hiring great people - Getting hired by Google, Amazon or Netflix is incredibly hard. That's because they want only the _right_ people to get in. Very different from the common approach of filling headcount with people that sound right on paper. 3. Empowered cross-functional product teams - lead by PM, eng-lead, UX and staffed with non-rotating engineers, these teams are given true business goals to achieve and the latitude to try out multiple ideas. 4. Business doesn’t run the show - the product org works closely with the business org, but not working for it. Product people are managed by true product leaders. 5. Being bold - unlike conventional orgs that just want to fit in, great product companies are willing to challenge the status quo and take risks. 6. Continuous iteration and feedback loops - From Google’s early beta products to Netflix’s A/B testing, Big-Tech companies know that great products are a result of endless iteration and testing with users. This is an excerpt from my article: How to Learn From FAANG:

I'm seeing companies eager to "Work Backwards" Like Amazon, use the "Spotify Model", or otherwise copy Big Tech processes. While it's great to be inspired by the most successful examples, we should realize these companies are different from ours. Their playbooks may not work for us. Having worked for 3 Big Techs I can tell you there's a lot we can learn, but we shouldn't start with process. It's their culture, dev philosophy, and principles that make companies like Google, Netflix, or Apple magical. Here are a few principles that all great product companies employ: 1. Customer focus - Putting the customers at the center of everything is expected across the org -- from engineers to lawyers. 2. Hiring great people - Getting hired by Google, Amazon or Netflix is incredibly hard. That's because they want only the _right_ people to get in. Very different from the common approach of filling headcount with people that sound right on paper. 3. Empowered cross-functional product teams - lead by PM, eng-lead, UX and staffed with non-rotating engineers, these teams are given true business goals to achieve and the latitude to try out multiple ideas. 4. Business doesn’t run the show - the product org works closely with the business org, but not working for it. Product people are managed by true product leaders. 5. Being bold - unlike conventional orgs that just want to fit in, great product companies are willing to challenge the status quo and take risks. 6. Continuous iteration and feedback loops - From Google’s early beta products to Netflix’s A/B testing, Big-Tech companies know that great products are a result of endless iteration and testing with users. This is an excerpt from my article: How to Learn From FAANG:

Thriving on Velocity! 🚀 Just caught Geoff Charles sharing the secrets behind Ramp's stellar growth—hitting $100M ARR in two years. Dive into their culture development with these key insights: 💯 Single-threaded Teams: Laser-focused product teams, ensuring dedicated time for PMs to hit goals. 🎯 Shielding from Chaos: Prioritize focus by protecting teams from distractions and chaos. 😍 Customer Feedback: Interestingly, Ramp's support team, reports into product team, places emphasis on customer check-ins. Every support ticket is seen as an opportunity to enhance the product. 💪 Empowered Teams: Ramp's success is rooted in building teams with autonomy and empowerment. #ShippingFast #EmpoweredTeams #SaaSSuccess

🙂 There's nothing like the thrill of working hard at your job by day 💻 & hustling on your startup by night. 👨💻 Just successfully built the raw prototype of my SaaS product. 🔥 The journey is tough but so rewarding! 🚀 And guess what? This is just the beginning! #Youtube #SaaSProduct #StartupLife #SaaS #HustleHard #Coder #Developer #SDE