Startup Musings

[tweetmeme source=”chenelaine” only_single=”false” service=”bit.ly”]
This is the third post in my Product Planning Series.

I decided to write this post after realizing that the actual activities and functional disciplines involved in building a new product are not necessarily apparent to people new to the game or seasoned professionals who come out of an unrelated functional discipline (e.g. finance).

Disclaimer: while the activities involved are generalizable, the actual staffing suggestions are only appropriate for a small company with a total headcount of 20-50. Companies much smaller or much larger than that will have a very different approach to staffing.

Activities involved in bringing a new product to market
There are several activities involved in bringing a new product to market. These activities need to happen regardless of who actually does the work.

• Strategic product management – market sizing and analysis, identifying a market problem worth solving, choosing a target market segment, developing a business case, coming up with a pricing model and go-to-market strategy, etc.
• Technical product management – persona development, requirements gathering, use case development, specifications development, generally advocating for the customer and end user’s needs and wants within the organization
• Project management – generating a program plan that spans disciplines, with clear task breakdowns, milestones and deliverables, then managing against this plan
• Technical development – implementing the product according to specifications, whatever form the specifications come in
• Quality assurance – checking the homework of the implementation to ensure it works as advertised
• Product marketing management – planning and executing market launch activities for this product to generate awareness
• Customer support – fielding inquiries from buyers and end users about the product, how to purchase, how to use, and resolving issues as they arise
• Sales – attracting target customers to try and / or buy the product

Hiring the right leaders to head up the product team
In a one-person startup, that one person will have to wear all of these hats. In reality, that is hardly optimal. Not only would this make for one grossly overworked individual, but I personally don’t know any one person who is fantastic at all of the above activities. Most of the time you will need multiple people to make up a product leadership team. Following are my personal take of who should be on this team. Your mileage may vary.

• Product Manager – enough said. This person takes care of product strategy, requirements gathering and product definition and is in charge of customer research. He or she is the internal advocate for the customer.
• Development Manager – this person heads up the technical organization and manages engineers. QA often reports to the Development Manager as well.
• Product Marketing Manager – this person is frequently not the product manager. PMM is predominantly an outbound function, while PM is an inbound function. The PMM comes up with the right messaging to communicate the benefits of the product and takes care of market launch activities.
• Sales Manager – this person uses positioning, messaging and other support materials generated by the PM and PMM to convert customers. Customer support often reports to sales as well.
• Operations Manager – in hardware companies, this person is concerned with manufacturing, operations, inventory management, and supply chain management. In web software companies, this person is concerned wtih server care and feeding, failover policies and the like.

Development team for a consumer SaaS web app
Having put together the leadership team, and hopefully defined the product to an actionable degree, you will need to assemble a team to do the actual development. The talent required on the development team depends 100% on the actual product or service itself.

For the example I’ve been using (i.e. a music education SaaS offering for young children), I would need to hire / assign the following people:

• Project Manager (PM) (this can be the development manager). This person is the Gantt Meister. (If you don’t know what a Gantt Chart is, you should probably not be the Project Manager yourself.)
• Information architect (IA). This is the person who has the most impact on user experience (UX) – they worry about how end users achieve their goals and how information is presented to them.
• Graphic designer. Contrary to what some people think, great information architects often don’t do all of the graphical presentation themselves. One way to think about it is that the IA worries about the cognitive aspect of a workflow, while the graphic designer worries about the esthetic presentation of this workflow. Between the IA and the graphic designer, the look and feel and actual UX of the web app is determined.
• Client side web developer. This is a developer who is highly adept at manipulating XHTML/CSS and is comfortable with various technologies to implement the designs created by the IA and the graphic designer. They can make any interactive effect shine on the front end. Some of them are strong graphic designers in their own right.
• Server side engineer / architect. This is a software engineer who chooses the right technical platform to develop on, architects the code, and decides how this code interfaces with various components such as the database, authentication engines, and client side code. They would be the right person to design and implement an external web services API if it exists.
• Database Administrator (DBA). This is the person who designs, implements and maintains the database for the web app. For small apps the server side architect can double as the DBA, but for very large apps it’s wise to have a dedicated DBA.

Of course, this entire discussion is moot if it’s a one person startup 🙂