Chris Doxey

Stop treating product like a board. It’s a business. Most teams still worship the backlog. Standups. Grooming. Velocity. All tidy. Little impact. AI now writes tickets, summaries, even priorities. So what’s left for us? Owning outcomes. Price. Revenue. Retention. Margin. I learned this in my first startup. We killed a B2C idea. Built a B2B product from our strengths. I did research, pricing, GTM, and the first sales pitches. Scrum was helpful. But small. The commercial work saved the company. That’s the future of product. Not more rituals. More ownership.

20

3 Comments

If the job of PM is to embody the voice of the customer, then explicit PM roles are less required the more your builders embody the customer directly. The inverse is also true. e.g. DevTools need less. Healthcare needs more.

3

One thing that I don’t hear a lot of people saying about grind culture is, to me, its defining quality… Grind culture is *really* expensive for Ops. And most startups have more Ops work than they think they do... Everyone needs to rest eventually, so even with a team of talented true believers working as hard as they can, there’s a finite number of things you can do in any day/quarter/year. Maybe it’s a high ceiling, but it’s a ceiling. Leaving aside the fact that generations of people fought for the 40 hr work week; longer hours are absolutely the norm in startups. Using myself as an example (sample size: 1) I often find myself in a happy flow and look up to realize it’s been dark for hours. It sneaks up on you when you love the work. I think a lot of startup folks experience this and, like me, kind of enjoy it. While late night emails might leave something to be desired, what I just described isn’t “grind culture”. Grind is often boring and repetitive with low immediate payoff. In the present moment, pro-grind culture discourse often frames grind as an unpleasant experience people are *willing to do* out of *dedication to the founders’ vision*. Totally different, and a huge problem for operational functions (Recruiting, Customer Service, Sales, Finance, etc) When I’m looking to improve efficiency, one of my first questions for ICs is, “what’s frustrating about your job?”. I ask this not to commiserate, but because that thing that sucks for an IC is 99% of the time, a labor-intensive distraction or just a silly manual process— something they think it’s a waste of their time. They’re often right; and time is, as they say, money. Your team knows what’s inefficient about your present operations. When you tell them to suck it up and grind through, you’re missing the point. This thing that sucks about their job is often also the systemic friction that’s hurting your margin by standing between your team and results. It's signal that part of your business isn’t (yet) ready for prime time. What’s missing is usually: 1) informed strategy, 2) the right tool for the job, or 3) prioritization/saying no. Scale doesn't outrun: selling to or supporting out-of-segment customers, sourcing candidates who you won’t hire, or taking on operational work that you can't serve well (Slack to Zapier to gSheets to ChatGPT, anyone?). When your team has the autonomy to solve problems differently than you would, and the discretion about when to grind through, you unlock potential better and cheaper approaches. Who doesn’t love that? To get the most out of asking ICs what's hard at work, adopt two ideas:  - Prioritization > “do both”. Every person’s time is precious, and limited. - Release the idea that “doing stuff” is inherently valuable. When doing stuff is valuable, there's a clear answer to "what problem does this solve?". After all, profit puts points on the board. Being busy doesn't. #Leadership #StartupGrowth

12

2 Comments