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How Innovators use Workomo #2: interviewing over video

During work-from-home, all hiring is now taking place over Meet & Zoom. Be it founders, big company execs, or recruiting managers in startups, interviewing candidates over video is the norm now globally.

During our conversations with Workomo users, several hiring managers have highlighted inadequate prep-time due to back-to-backs, as a key challenge 🧗🏽‍♀️ Pre-WFH, offline interviews happened in structured environments (eg. office spaces, on-campus etc.) with a scheduled cadence that let hiring managers plan their day and get breathing room. Now, interviews happen from messy living rooms & home-offices, squeezed between home-schooling kids, putting toddlers to sleep & doing personal chores. What makes it worse is an ever-increasing number of video meetings throughout the day, both internal & external. End-result: not enough time to prep on candidates, leading to ineffective interviews & anxiety.

Even under this time pressure, hiring managers still recognize getting a holistic perspective on a candidate’s persona as a critical need💡 In today’s knowledge economy, getting that one key hire right (or wrong!) can disproportionately impact team outcomes.

In a nutshell, in this working environment of back-to-back Zoom/ Meet interviews, skimming PDF resumes or LinkedIn profiles to do prep on candidates at high scale & velocity has become cumbersome. This is exactly where innovator users are using Workomo.

As a hiring manager, even if you don’t have enough time to prep before a video interview, Workomo automatically pops-up a candidates’s professional profile in your meeting workflow at the right access points (browser, calendar, Meet, Zoom) a few minutes before the meeting.

Do you feel the mental-overload of quickly making sense of a cluttered PDF resume (unfortunately, candidates don’t build resumes keeping your user experience in mind🔥)? Don’t worry — Workomo presents people info in the form of Cue Cards. These are distilled professional insights about the candidate, designed to be consumed in a 1–2 mins “last-minute-prep” scenario.

Distilled insights into the person, including commonalities

As a founder hiring for my own startup, I now consciously look beyond static resumes, to understand the holistic persona of someone I am about to interview🔍 What are the thematic interests of this person? What does the person tweet about? Are there any commonalities that I can find & subsequently utilize to ice-break and create a more comfortable interviewing environment? Workomo Cue Cards are a great way to access these insights in a byte-sized way.

As we introduce more powerful product features over the next quarter, we are super excited to see how the usage of Workomo by hiring managers evolves further. If you are in the midst of hiring over Zoom or Meet today, try Workomo & see if it works for you🙇🏽‍♂️

PS: this post is part of the “How Innovators use Workomo” series, in which we share how our most retained users are using the product. Check out the previous post on using Workomo for meeting someone new on Lunchclub here!

How Innovators use Workomo #1: LunchClub meetings

It’s been almost 3 months since we launched Workomo on Product Hunt. Since then, we have seen double-digits week-on-week growth in new users, with Innovator users from all over the world using the product and giving active feedback on how to make it more useful for them🙏🏽 We are also starting to notice interesting patterns emerge from how retained users are using the product.

Given Workomo’s core value proposition of “one-click people insights for virtual meetings” applies to many different kinds of professional personas and scenarios, I have been getting this question a lot from users — “what are the kinds of meetings & situations where Workomo will provide the most value to me?”💡

Am starting this “How Innovators use Workomo” series of posts, essentially to share how our most retained users are using the product. Hopefully, this will help better explain Workomo’s potential benefit to you as a professional, and illustrate ways it can help make your video meetings over Zoom/ Meet more productive.

To begin with, let me talk about LunchClub meetings as one of the main scenarios where users are finding Workomo extremely useful. During our Product Hunt launch itself, the community highlighted how LunchClub & Workomo could potentially be used together in a powerful way.

Source: Workomo’s launch post on Product Hunt

Doing people-prep before meeting a new person

LunchClub is a global platform that does curated 1:1 introductions, helping professionals connect with other like-minded people. It’s HQ in the Bay Area and rapidly growing in traction across key markets.

In its current form, Workomo has immense value when meeting a new person & hence, is being used by LunchClub users to prep before meeting a new person they got matched with on the platform.

Typically in this scenario, users pre-Workomo looked up people on LinkedIn or via Google search, each meeting-prep requiring multiple clicks & significant mental bandwidth. If one wanted to go deeper and also lookup people on platforms like Twitter, this took even more time. In fact, trying to fit this people-prep effort within a user’s crammed professional life led to most just giving up on prepping, despite fully understanding the value it creates.

Workomo solves this problem really well:

— With one click in the browser, Workomo ‘Cue Cards’ show you summarized professional insights aggregated from multiple platforms, all in one place. This eliminates the need to go to multiple platforms, saving mental energy, time (& clicks!)⏳

— Because Workomo integrates into the calendar📅, it’s able to auto-identify meeting schedule & attendees, thus popping up the Cue Card at exactly the right time with exactly the right info. One-click, zero-typing experience 🖲

2. Especially strong benefits for video meetings during WFH

With the prevailing WFH environment, LunchClub meetings also went fully virtual over the last few months. This has helped unlock Workomo’s video meeting value proposition. Today, LunchClub users, via the browser, view info about the person they are meeting with, without leaving their Zoom/ Meet/ other meeting screens👩🏽‍💻

3. ‘T-60 to T+60’ secs

Specifically in the video meeting workflow, we have noticed an interesting pattern from how users are leveraging Workomo. Most use it in the time window of 60 secs before+60 secs after meeting start time⏲ Because networking meetings typically get crammed in the middle of hectic job tasks & personal errands, prep-time at disposal is really less, and therefore, time-saved in people-prep is extremely important.

Given Workomo Cue Cards have been designed to make the info skimmable & easy to digest in <60 secs, they perfectly solve this problem. Carefully-timed pop-up reminders embedded without friction in the user’s workflow, combined with the ability to view people-info directly within Meet & Zoom via the browser, further drives the 3P benefit (Productive People Prep) for users.

T-60 secs (on the calendar)

T=0 (entering the video call)

T+60 secs (beginning of the video call: waiting room scenario, round-the-table intros etc.)

So next time you are meeting someone new, especially on a virtual networking platform like LunchClub, do give Workomo a shot and see if you find it useful🙇🏽‍♂️

‘Product-First’ approach to building companies

Recently, David Sacks shared about having a product-first approach to building companies, drawing on how Square & PayPal used similar strategies to identify market gaps & solve for them. Here are the key takeaways:

#1 Make a simple product with a clear “hook” to grab users. Typically, this hook is a high-frequency task that users can do in the product to engage with it and subsequently, can then be enticed to engage with other features in the stack. Square -> Swipe, PayPal ->Email Money.

#2 Couple the product hook with a distribution trick that can create viral adoption of the product. Square ->distinctive hardware design & branding. PayPal -> email virality via sending money.

#3 Hook+Distribution trick together hopefully drive enough early users to start learning from. Unique market insight doesn’t appear via a brain wave from founders. It’s identified via observing who is using the product & why. Eg. Square -> merchants not having a credit history.

#4 Build the operating capabilities necessary to execute on this insight. For instance, both Square and PayPal had to build new types of fraud detection systems to solve the lack of credit history & processes. These operating capabilities & IP, turn, become long term moats.

#5 Finally, in this process of operationalizing the market insight, an overarching business theme will emerge. Eg. for Square, it became “access”. Start building out your product roadmap around this theme, and keep adding more offerings but all centered around this “North Star”.

To summarize, getting a unique market insight to build a startup on, first requires launching a simple product that gets user-adoption, observing who they are and why they are using it, and then extrapolating that to re-frame the true pain point of the user.

Building a product to solve for this “reframed” user problem will automatically result in a truly differentiated product that is filling a key gap in the market that few others are seeing in the way you are seeing.

You can read the complete article on David’s substack here.

Note: this post first appeared on the Workomo blog here.

Learnings from 100s of YC companies

Heard an excellent conversation between Michael Seibel (CEO of YC) and Patrick O’Shaughnessy (top asset manager, also moonlighting as an amazing podcaster). It had many fundamental insights that would help any founder♟ Sharing my top takeaways here:

#1 Don’t be too “smart” for your own good: there is nothing like that one breakthrough idea that is guaranteed to work 100%. Teams need to be willing to iterate, pivot & execute in new directions all the time 🛶

#2 Launch!!! At the 0-to-1 stage, the most important thing is the ability of a team to build & launch a working product, as fast as possible. You can’t build a company if you don’t launch in the first place 🚀

#3 Startups are all about momentum: teams need to demonstrate forward momentum in whatever time they have spent building the product. The best teams generate rapid momentum to acquire users & fundraise with this tailwind 🏎

#4 What kind of problem is worth solving? a) high frequency⏰, b) high intensity🔦, c) high willingness to pay💵. Overall, founders need to have some special insight into the problem they are setting out to solve💡

#5 Founders essentially take 2 kinds of risk: a) product risk🛠, not sure if people need this product (typically taken by relatively younger founders) and b) execution risk🔨, I know this product is needed but not sure of execution (usually taken by more experienced founders).

#6 Be “real” when coaching founders: be upfront in presenting facts about high failure rates. And that to win, you have to reach out for extraordinary (be 2 standard deviations from average). Also, emphasize the importance of developing tools to manage their emotions & health⚖️

#7 Best way to create leverage during your fundraising process? Acquire users & grow m-o-m. Pitch with real users & data. It’s possible to raise money just on ideas/prototypes, but you will have zero leverage in these discussions. Your goal should be to fundraise with leverage💪🏼

#8 What is Product-Market Fit? It’s like a sledgehammer to your jaw. It’s that month or quarter where you get so many users that it breaks your systems. When the sheer market traction bypasses all your spreadsheet plans & projections. When you have PMF, you WILL know it🚰

To conclude, what I found most intriguing was the importance of “bravery” in founders🧗🏽‍♀️ 2020 has shoved in our faces a plethora of issues we are facing as a species. The need of the hour is a generation of founders that take on problems that are intimidating to solve⭐️

Note: this post first appeared on the Workomo blog here.

Smarter engineering decisions in startups

Team Workomo had an excellent working session on engineering last week with Prashanth Susarla, ex-CTO of PayU. He shared several frameworks and heuristics with us for taking smarter tech decisions as a really early-stage startup. Sharing key insights below 🎯

#1 Less is more: proactively look for platform elements where you can avoid coding and offload to off-the-shelf services. Look for opportunities where you can cut down your own code. Avoid unnecessarily complex approaches for low-value tasks 🤺

#2 Invest in automated testing: it will yield valuable dividends compared to manual testing. In fact, engineering teams should invest in automated testing ASAP else it becomes part of a broken culture that’s tough to change later ⚙️

#3 Testing is strategic to the product: often teams tend to view testing as low-value ops. Being able to design great test cases is a high-value skill. Break down the most critical user journeys and start automating them. Don’t sweat over perfecting the testing frameworks yet 🛠

#4 Aim for architecture reliability, not perfection: at really early stages, with rapid product iterations and pivots, engineering teams need to build for progress and not perfection. Having said that, keep periodically stress testing your backend for expected traction loads 🏋🏼‍♀️

#5 Define engineering SLAs via highly-specific user stories: eg. a user story could be “95th percentile of my users should not see more than a 5 min delay between updating their Gsuite calendar vs those changes reflecting in the Workomo panel” 🎥

#6 Apply ML to project future loads & requirements: while engineering is building for high-velocity weekly/ biweekly releases, certain core elements require thinking through requirements say after 1–1.5 yrs. However, you can’t build for it right now. So use ML to break down the problem and optimize 🔬

#7 Account for engineering activities in product sprints: core engineering tasks that aren’t always directly related to a specific feature release, still need to be baked into sprint planning & timelines. Helps balance prioritization between feature releases and tech debt optimization ⛹🏽‍♀️

#8 Build a strong engineering culture: that happens as a result of adopting strong habits. A bad habit will often give you speed but destroy value in the long run. Even if you are moving in bi-weekly sprints, always have a 3-month view and a 1-year strategy in place ⏳

#9 Security is important even for a really early product: your platform coming under attack is not a question of “if”, it’s a question of “when”. Think about security as soon as you launch, even in private beta. Imagine a doomsday scenario once a month and prepare for it 🏹

#10 Finally, the best engineering teams are driven by humility: while looking to build any feature or platform, teams need to be incredibly honest to themselves about their present capabilities, what risks can they take, what plans can they pull off & take decisions accordingly 🧗🏽‍♀️

What are some engineering best practices that have worked for you in an early startup environment? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Note: this post first appeared on the Workomo blog here.

Game design playbook for products

Recently came across an amazing talk by Rahul Vohra on how to incorporate game design principles in any software product (Superhuman has, of course, nailed this). Sharing my notes from it below:

#1 Similar to how games have levels & rewards that create instant gratification, create in-product goals for the user that are concrete, achievable & rewarding. For instance, the #inboxZero goal that Superhuman sets for users. Goals take any product beyond just utility & make it fun 🎯

#2 Design for nuanced emotion. Product value needs to be defined beyond just tangible jobs-to-be-done, to include “how it makes the user feel”. Emotions like joy, pride, achievement, trust, fun! Eg. showing a serene pic 🏞 to the user on achieving the in-product goal.

#3 Similar to how games have complex control sequences that are fun to master and expand the game’s potential, software products too, can have rapid & robust controls that match the user’s context of multi-tasking & expecting instant gratification. Eg. smart keyboard shortcuts 🎮

#4 Introduce toys that increase the fun quotient and incent users to spend more time with the product, while also strongly gelling with core features and enhancing value delivery. Eg. fun universal search bar with surprising auto-suggest elements 🔍

#5 Help the user get zoned into the product experience to create extraordinary engagement (almost a “flow” state💻) by making each next step obvious and minimizing energy to be spent in any sort of decision-making. Eg on archiving, moving the user to the next message in milliseconds 🚴🏼‍♀️

#6 Continuing the objective of creating an in-product “flow” state for users, giving clear and immediate feedback to users with no distraction ⛷

#7 Final strategy for creating a “flow” state within the product is to introduce certain challenging skills and make it a little hard for users to master them. Overcoming challenges create dopamine, a feeling of achievement within the user. That feeling will stick with users for a long, long time 🧗🏽‍♀️

Finally, these game design principles need to be executed within the wrapper of your product’s core design language. This includes design principles that you have specifically chosen like say, minimalism, full screen to minimize distractions, there when you need & away when you don’t, etc.

If I have to summarize my overall takeaway — in this era where any software is cheap to replicate, products can stand out by designing for what emotions your target users will feel as they use the product. And making it fun!

PS: Suhas Motwani, great job in organizing this session!

Note: this article first appeared on the Workomo blog here.

Founder vs Investor: both sides of the table

I was a VC in the really early part of my career, then became an operator+angel investor for several years, before founding Workomo. Here’s how my lens for looking at company-building has evolved from an investor then vs. founder now:

#1 Doing 0-to-1 is really hard — as an investor, I never truly realized how hard it is to “make something people want” from scratch & have someone care enough to try using what you have built. The struggles of building from 0 can only be truly understood when experienced first-hand.

#2 Appreciation for engineering talent — as an investor, while one understands the importance of quality developers, the focus tends to be more high-level in terms of looking at leadership (CTO/VPs). As a founder, I now feel gratitude when I work with top-tier functional engineers.

I have seen how a solid iOS engineer can save weeks of extra cash burn while delivering excellent output. Or how quality backend engineers are so hard to find. Or in a small engineering team, a developer with 20% better output can really move the needle via effort-compounding.

#3 Importance of iterations — as an investor, I don’t remember ever asking founders: “how many iterations did it take you to get here? And what did you learn?”. Perhaps, ‘cos I had never been a 0-to-1 founder, I focused more on “outcomes” and never on the “process”.

Now as a founder, my core operating philosophy revolves around 1) “lean” iterations, 2) systems-thinking & 3) agile dev. (hypothesize-build-get users-learn-iterate-repeat). When facing high failure rates & random outcomes, the only thing you can truly control is the process.

#4 Re-orienting from “speed” to “velocity” — a piece of frequent advice I gave as an investor was “do things at even more speed” or “how can we ship even quicker?” or “can we fundraise even sooner?”. It was missing one thing: “are we moving quickly enough IN the right direction?”.

Investors want quick results, whereas as a founder, you know building outstanding products takes time & thoughtfulness. Even if you ship quickly, building the wrong thing without pausing to learn, analyze & re-orient will result in no one using it.

#5 Design is not just UI/ UX, it’s end-to-end product experience — as an investor, my view of a portfolio company’s product was just limited to what “I could see” and what “I could use”. As a founder, I now think about “what the user will FEEL”, right from the landing page, down to repeat usage.

#6 Effective teams aren’t just about assembling the most talented — as an investor, one primarily looks for signals of talent (track record, pedigree, intelligence, expertise). As a founder, I now include commitment & fit in the hiring matrix. Sometimes even as a filter.

While “how can we hire an engineer from Google or FB” is a good question to discuss with investors, other high-impact questions that need focus include “how is the team morale?”, “how can we better reinforce the vision.” or “how is trust being built as a remote team?”.

#7 Limited value of startup playbooks — a common technique investors use to try and add value to the portfolio is sharing what other companies/ founders are doing, their approach, what seems to be working for them etc. I have been guilty of this as well.

While there is some merit to having market intel & learning from other founders’ experiences, you quickly realize as a founder that all so-called playbooks are biased, post-facto analysis & polished versions of reality. You gotta figure out your own unique way.

#8 Who is a co-founder? — when looking at co-founders in a team, the top things I would primarily evaluate as an investor: 1) do they have complementary skill sets (engg+product+biz)? and 2) will this team look good enough on a deck, to be able to raise the next round?

Now with the perspective of a founder, I evaluate many other facets in founding teams: 1) does this person have the same level of passion, desire & commitment to building this company?, 2) when sh*t hits the fan, will this person be last-person-standing, 3) how much can this person sacrifice to see things through till the end?

#9 “Closing” with no logos behind you is damn hard — with IDG Ventures or Alibaba behind me, all doors were open. I could reach anyone, get quick responses, and easily attract people to my projects. Made it easy for me to say to founders: “let’s close this deal” or “let’s hire this person”.

As a founder, I have now felt how hard it truly is to hire, close deals or close any opportunity for that matter, when you are trying to build an unproven company, on a vision that’s new & hard to visualize, with a product that keeps frequently changing & has no scale yet.

#10 Guarding your mental state is everything — startups are a mental game. All the awesome founder qualities that people talk about — grit, perseverance, belief, conviction, are all internal. Perhaps the biggest miss I had as an investor is not observing the mental state of founders.

This becomes especially challenging as founders like to put up a brave face in front of their investors. I now strongly believe that it’s the job of investors to look past this veil of confidence and help unshackle their true mental state. I regret not doing this the most.

Ultimately, investors become successful when they back the best founders, who then get lucky :). Similarly, founders improve their odds by having the best investors in their corner. Personally, it has been incredible to experience both worlds & realize how different they are.

PS: if you are curious about what I am building, Workomo is a Chrome extension that shows you everything important about people, just before you meet, right inside the browser. We are already in private beta — do check us out and sign-up to request access. #peopleinsights

Note: this article first appeared on the Workomo blog.

Operating a fully-remote founding team: Learnings

Even before this forced wave of work-from-home, I consciously built Workomo as a fully-remote, distributed US-India team from scratch, viewing it as a key competitive advantage. In fact, even today, most of my team have never met each other in-person :). Here’s my learning from operating a founding team of ‘strangers’:

Reinforce — remote teams don’t have the luxury of office space, day-long huddles, and offsites to maintain focus and motivation. Founders need to reinforce the “Mission” 10x more than usual — why did we start this company? Why should we exist? Why did you join in the first place?
Plan — this becomes especially crucial as people aren’t under the same roof. Each person having razor-sharp clarity on what the team needs to achieve and in what time frame, is super-important. The Plan needs to include Monthly KPIs (make it Quarterly for scaled companies), translated to Weekly Tasks. More on this next.
Break it down — tracking, measuring & course-correcting becomes really challenging when people can’t be physically pulled into review sessions. I have found breaking down KPIs into really small, byte-sized tasks per member per week to be incredibly helpful. Small is beautiful!
Communicate — remote teams need even more rigorous and frequent KPI communication. Both for Monthly KPIs and Weekly Tasks, ideally schedule a) kick-off session, 2) mid-period review and 3) end-review+retrospective. Just to re-emphasize, do these weekly even for tactical execution tracks.
Clarify — remote teams have a big challenge in people not being able to walk up to their leaders/peers and ask clarifying questions. It’s hard anyway to ask questions in digital meetings, & time zone differences make it worse. Founders need to proactively clarify the “Why” behind each execution track, perhaps even multiple times especially during a crunch week where several priorities are getting worked on in parallel. Repetition of the “Why” is never enough. Clarifications are never enough.
Cadence — set a cadence (daily/ weekly, as applicable) for huddles, standups, town halls, and 1:1s. Ensure they are respected and taken seriously. Founders need to personally drive discipline around attendance, starting on time, tight agendas & focused discussions.
Empathy — effectiveness of remote WFH is deeply impacted by the personal environments of employees. Founders should make themselves aware of these surroundings, so the team’s operating style & cadence is empathetic to their situations. For instance, which team members have kids, and of what age? Do people have space to make a home office? Do the engineers prefer to code at night or during the day? Accounting for these elements can go a long way in driving both productivity and a caring environment.
Observe — pay attention to everyone’s energy on the Zoom call. Who seems to be on top of their game? Whose shoulders are drooping? Who seems low on energy? Is anyone not feeling well? Follow-up accordingly — perhaps a quick 1:1 pep-talk. Some love. Some advice. Bit extra care!
Mix it up — internal digital meetings with the same agenda every week can quickly get boring. Try mixing it up by say, together watching a YC video on getting first 1,000 users, getting a guest speaker for a product huddle or asking a team member to present something cool!
Involve — unlike in-person, it’s really hard to observe body language, transmit energy & get everyone onboard in remote work. Extra-effort is needed towards getting everyone truly involved in digital meetings, energizing them, and making them partners in decisions. Some good ways to do this: a) function-specific huddles where members executing that function lead, manage and participate, and b) every member should routinely “present” their work to the entire team, even if it’s for 10 mins. Provide everyone with opportunities to earn & share respect.
Celebrate — a big part of co-located teams is going out to celebrate mini-wins. Happy hours, brown bag lunches, etc. Like any solid sports team, celebrating wins together is important for creating bonds & reinforcing a shared mission. Don’t shy away from doing it even over video!
Humor — it’s hard to have workplace banter when everyone is glued to a screen. Digital meetings anyway tend to become intense due to maintaining constant eye contact. So, while accomplishing work goals is important, don’t forget to have a few silly laughs with the team.

Ultimately, operating an effective & happy remote team involves going the extra mile to create a strong human quotient. Software like Zoom, Meet & Slack can only enable efficiency. In the end, it’s all about emotions, motivations & bonding over a common cause. Keep it real!

PS: Here’s what our team has been building over the last few months — Workomo is a Chrome extension that shows you everything important about people, just before you meet, right inside the browser. We are already in private beta — do check us out and sign-up to request access. #peopleinsights

Product Management Cheat Sheet for “0-to-1”

Recently came across this awesome podcast by Hiten Shah wherein he shares really practical and execution-oriented insights on building products from 0-to-1. Here are my top 10 takeaways:

Framework for evaluating whether the “problem to be solved” is worth solving — is it 1) frequent enough, 2) painful enough and 3) urgent enough?
An upfront filter he used to evaluate potential startup ideas — building a product that “every human being that’s connected to the Internet would need to use”.
“Ideas are just solutions to problems”. As most founders start with an idea, it’s important to figure out what’s the underlying customer problem that this idea is trying to solve.
A great method to evaluate a product idea — as every product idea has an existing alternative out there, try and figure out what users think of current alternatives. Essentially, it’s important to quickly understand the market landscape BUT from a customer’s standpoint.
a) Every new product is a derivative of something that has already existed. b) It’s very hard to find a brand new problem. Problems remain the same, just that their nature keeps evolving, which in turn, creates opportunities for new products to be built. Ultimately, most software is a replacement for some sort of an excel sheet.
a) Two ways to build startup products from scratch: 1) COPY-BUILD-ITERATE-GET TO UNIQUE. Copy fast, launch, then discover & find new things to innovate on. 2) RESEARCH-LEARN-BE UNIQUE FROM DAY 0. Learn how to be different first, but without shipping. Make something 10x better. b) If you are good at building teams and executing, go for Option a. If you are good at user research and patiently innovating, go for Option b. Choose the option that aligns most with your strengths.
User research tips for startup Day 0: a) Usually, about 12 interviews are enough to develop a pattern. b) 2 questions to ask users (i) what’s your #1 pain point in doing X and (ii) walk me through a real story of the last time you experienced this pain point.
a) Tip to avoid product over-spec’ing/ scope creep: for any feature that needs to be built, first figure out the exact “Step 1” to be built for it, and keep a constraint of “it should be shippable with 1 week/ 40 hours of engineering. effort”. b) This Step 1 should be crude enough that it gets built quickly, but just sufficiently spec’d so that it can drive the user validation exercise. Eg., before building a full sharing capability, just put a dummy sharing button that on clicking, asks the user “what are you looking to do here?”.
For effective product road-mapping, always ask the question “what part of this product is getting the most usage?”. That’s the area that will drive adoption and where you should be doubling down on.
Build a highly customer-centric product team. Everything you are doing needs to be solving a problem for the customer. Keep that focus and discipline.

I have learned many of these points first-hand while building Workomo from scratch over the last year or so, so I can attest to how useful these product heuristics are. Would love to hear some of your own learnings as a founder/ early-stage PM, so we can keep adding on to this cheat sheet.

Top 15 insights on how to operate as a startup leader

Recently came across a great conversation between Keith Rabois and AngelList, back from Aug’18. So many tactical insights for operators, founders, big co./ startup teams, or anyone who is interested in understanding how leaders should operate on-the-ground. My key takeaways below:

Talent can be classified into “Barrels” (can independently execute end-to-end, from idea to product-in-market) and “Ammunition” (require supervision, execute only specific elements well). The number of Barrels in your team governs how many parallel things you can do.
Every business can be ultimately distilled into an “equation”, with key revenue & cost variables that ultimately drive profit. Founders need to understand their business’s equation really well, which is what drives strategic insights that lead to better decisions.
A key job of a founder or CXO is to compress “time” for the business, via a communication strategy of “simplify” and “clarify”.
In the majority of cases, larger engineering teams tend to slow execution down. Paraphrasing a quote by Eric Schmidt — “one of the most powerful things is 2 engineers working together”.
Put your best people on the most challenging problems, irrespective of what it does to your org. chart.
The more transparency around data and information that the CEO can create, the better everyone else can make day-to-day operating decisions that align with the company goals and strategy.
There is a saying in sports that a particular team has been “coached to play fast”. This is what startup leaders need to do to increase the speed of execution — coach their teams in a way that they can take fast decisions & react instantly, and in high fidelity to company goals.
As a leader, it’s important to speak in “Whys?”, and not “What we are doing?”.
As a leader, it’s important to change your management style as per the kind of individuals or teams you are working with at a particular point in time.
The CEO is the “Chief Editor” of the company. You aren’t actually doing a lot of the functional work yourself but your key job is to a) simplify things for others, 2) create consistency across teams, and 3) create a coherent narrative & voice, internally & externally.
As a founder, it’s important to understand the difference between a “bad” team and an “incomplete” team. Both require very different strategies.
Best way to onboard talent (from intern to exec) -> start with as narrow a scope as possible, let them succeed at it, and then keep expanding their scope & pushing their range.
Hiring is a muscle — you get stronger as you do more of it.
An important question to answer while hiring: are you hiring for upside creation (is there a spark?) or downside protection (rigorous value creation role)?
A simple best practice to improve hiring is to borrow your network to vet candidates and do comprehensive reference checks.

I already started implementing a bunch of these at my startup Workomo. Would love to know if you have used some of these tenets in the past, and your experience/ key learnings from it.