Cross-sell is dead

Every companies’ strategy mentions owning the full customer relationship as a key goal. The thinking goes somewhat like this.

  • We have identified a customer need in a super specific niche area inside a large industry vertical.
  • Once we acquire this customer for this super specific need, we want to continue serving them and building a relationship with them
  • This same customer has varied needs that exist in the large industry vertical, a vertical that is unnecessary complex and filled with incumbents offering poor products.
  • We will build products that address all their needs. We will cross them into all these products
  • The customer is happy as there is only one place to go for all his needs
  • We will own the customer for everything they need in that industry vertical – we build high LTV
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Anti Pattern – The Head Of problem.

The anti-pattern I’d like to explore today is what I affectionally call the head of problem aka senior’itis. In my experience, this is the factor in org design that increases burn and bureaucracy. This anti-pattern is lethal for companies.

It starts off quite innocently. Let’s assume you are the CEO at the early stages of a company and you have identified a problem to solve, say in the general area of customer support. Customer support as a function doesn’t exist yet. You ask around your peer group, you look at successful companies and then you make the common mistake – you get afflicted by senior’itis. You decide that you need somebody senior to run that function, you need somebody who has done it before somebody with pedigree. You need a Head of customer support. You then spend a lot of time trying to woo the right candidate, the one that checks all the boxes. You hire him after a long drawn out courtship. You are happy, your customer support problem will be solved, you have found the right person. You have hired a person who will take accountability to solve the problem.

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Anti Pattern – The Ponzi Roadmap

The anti-pattern I’d like to explore today is the Ponzi roadmap. It usually starts with the best of intentions but has extremely harmful effects as a company scales.

When a company is in the initial stages and has a small engineering and product team the planning model that emerges is what I call the pooled model. Engineering is considered a  pool of resources and usually composed of full-stack engineers. The product is typically small and mostly a monolith, every engineer can work on anything and there are just a few PM’s (maybe just one). Since we are all agile, every quarter the PM comes up with a list of priorities and outcomes, engineering staffs the priority from its pool of engineers and delivers outcomes. The next quarter rolls around and we do this all over again. Engineers move on to working on different things every quarter. This makes perfect sense in a small company – but goes horribly wrong as you start scaling up.

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The GFC changed us as a generation – adventures in labour market slack

Alphachat (great podcast btw) had a recent episode on Labor market slack that raised some intriguing questions. The central question is how to define slack, what is the right metric. The end result was that slack means different things to different people – but there is one thread that I’d like to explore more.

Let’s start with the concept of NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment). Wikipedia defines it as “NAIRU refers to a level of unemployment below which inflation rises”. Central Bank Monetary policy is always and forever worried about inflation. The expected cycle is that as unemployment falls, wages will rise as supply of workers is constrained – less supply, more depends, prices i.e wages have to rise. When wages rise, input costs for producers rise which they will pass on the end consumers. Thus the general price level of the economy will rise hence leading to inflation. Continue reading “The GFC changed us as a generation – adventures in labour market slack” →

Nostalgia kills | Practical tips for leaders

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory – Franklin Pierce Adams

We’ve all read about how culture eats strategy for lunch. The internet is jam-packed with a million blog posts on the superficialities of culture. Its time for some inside baseball with some actual actionable things to watch out for and prevent.

It is absolutely true that the culture of the company dictates how it can adapt to change and eventually succeed. Culture is hugely important, however along the journey from a small company to a midsize company to a large public company, the culture will change. At all these stages, different parts of the company will have different cultures and norms. In fact sometimes within the same team, you will have differences based on where the teams are located and their size.

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Its been 10 long years | Lessons from the GFC

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Cartoon by Mike Luckovich

It’s been 10 years since the 2008 financial crisis. Astute observers will correct me and point out that the crisis actually started in early 2007 when the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit collapsed. This was the first collapse of a hedge fund that was loaded up to the gills with subprime CDO’s. If you were following FT Alphaville in late 2006/ early 2007, you’d be ahead of the game. The signs were there! Some great coverage to relive and re-read

So how does this relate to you, young product manager? Some obvious and simple lessons articulated below. Continue reading “Its been 10 long years | Lessons from the GFC” →