Strategy is a shared narrative. A strategy that no one understands is like a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear the thud. So how do you make it real? How do you turn that strategy from something vague, to something tangible.
In this talk we'll pick away at that problem by exploring the North Star Framework. The North Star Framework is a model for managing products by identifying a single, crucial metric (the North Star Metric) that captures the core value that your product delivers to your customers. In addition to the metric, the North Star Framework includes a set of key inputs that collectively act as factors that produce the metric. Product teams teams can directly influence these inputs with their day-to-day work.
My goal for this talk is to leave you with both a working knowledge of the North Star Framework, and inspiration for how your strategy can be made more visible and tangible.
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Okay, we're back for the final, keynote of today's session and, someone that I've been, you know, I've said this a few times, but it's always true. There's a whole bunch, I've got a long list of speakers that I want to get to TuringFest and we kind of work our way through them each year.
John Cutler, our next speaker, has been on that list for quite a while. He and I caught up earlier in the year back in February. He spoke at, Mind the Product in Manchester and, we spoke at that. And at the time, I invited him over to Turing and he was like, Yeah, I'd love to come.
It just depends on how this coronavirus thing is going to play out. That was in February and that was one of the first times I heard about it. So John was ahead of the curve. And he's been ahead of the curve on product management for a long time.
He's highly regarded, well renowned and highly regarded in his space. And we hear a lot about North Star metrics in startups these days. Mark Logan mentioned it in his talk earlier. It's been mentioned in a few other talks over the course of the conference so far.
But now we're going go to the guy who literally wrote the book. So over to John Cutler to talk about the North Star framework. Hello, my name is John Cutler, and I'm here in Santa Barbara, California in my basement at one o'clock in the morning.
And I'm extremely excited to be presenting my talk exploring the North Star framework. Just a bit about me before we get going. I have a background in product management, UX research. I head a product education at a company called Amplitude, which is centered around product analytics.
And I actually wrote a book about this called North Star Framework, which you can Google and find. So I'm very excited to be speaking with you today. That's the URL. If you're interested, amplitude dot com slash north star. It's a real team effort, but we've gotten a lot of great feedback about it so far.
So let's start with the problem that the North Star framework attempts to address. And the the first part of it is is what I would call reactive feature factories, which is teams that that are extremely reactive, just shipping whatever on their mind, whoever shouts the loudest, creating these these overly complex products that people don't quite understand.
They lose sight of their customers. You have these very prescriptive road maps that teams are are what I, you know, what I call the feature factory. They're just attempting to ship all these particular features. And if you work in one of these companies, you know how it feels.
It just it just feels like you can't figure out where your work fits in. You don't really understand the big picture. There's a lot of success theater, but you don't really understand how your work makes a difference. Now, in other companies, what you find is what I call driving in data circles.
So these are actually companies that are very data savvy. They're very data driven, but they're they're just focused on these small optimizations. They're always tweaking. They're almost experimenting for experimentation's sake. And although you have kind of the cool certainty of your AB test working, you still don't really know how your work is maybe helping the human beings out in the world.
Maybe your landing page performs better, but you don't really know if your work is really working, setting up your company for long term success. Now another problem the North Star framework attempts to address is as follows. Alignment is actually pretty easy. So here on the left, we we imagine these two walls and someone says, go here, and you're told to march down between those walls.
And that's how you can get alignment. You just force people to do something. Now on the right is is chaos in a sense. Right? There's autonomy, but no alignment. It's just feels like you're freestyling. And many people work in companies like this, that they're given a lot of autonomy, but again, the company's not very aligned.
It's just extremely chaotic. And I've worked in both of these types of organizations, and both feel a little unnerving when it comes down to it. The aligned but no autonomy environments feel like you just can't experiment, you just can't figure out your own solutions, and the autonomy but no alignment environments just feel like you're wandering, like a random walk.
Now the other problem the North Star framework attempts to address is that in product, it takes a while for our decisions to bear fruit. All of our brilliant decisions in this chart take time, and what we're experiencing right now is actually a sum of the brilliant decisions and the not so brilliant decisions we've made in the past.
The revenue of today is actually a function of a couple years worth of decisions that we're making. And that can be pretty hard. You know, back to those data driven teams, they might be impacting what's exactly happening right now, but they're not necessarily putting the foundation in place for long term success.
Now one of the the final problems this attempts to address is when product is caught in the middle. You have the business on one side, and they're talking about dollars and cents, and they've got their charts, and all of those go up to the right.
And over on the right, you have this world of product and personas and what's going on in your product and the experience and design. And the poor product manager is sitting there in the middle attempting to translate back and forth between the business and the people who are building the product.
And although a lot of product managers I would even say earlier in my career, I kind of prided myself on being bilingual. I could speak the business language and speak the language of the people working on the product. This gets really tiring and it gets really old quickly.
So with that, I bring you the North Star framework. So this is not too complicated to wrap your head around. So you establish a North Star metric, and you establish a series of inputs that tie into that North Star metric. So I like to think of it almost as a constellation.
You know, you imagine you're sailing across an ocean, the North Star Polaris is up there, depending on the hemisphere you're in, of course, And you you see this constellation, and that helps you navigate. Now we can turn the North Star metric on its end a little bit to explain an interesting aspect of the North Star framework.
So here on the left, we have the stuff that we're working on. Now this is the tasks. It's the stuff. It's the things that we imagine we're building, the features. Now in the North Star framework, that stuff is meant to impact what we call inputs.
So you can see here we have three inputs, one, two, and three. Now you can have more, but for this example, I have three. Now these inputs are meant to impact the North Star metric. So that's that one metric sitting there in the middle of the screen.
And then off all the way to the right, we have sustainable mid to long term growth of our company. So there's different names for this type of thing. Some people call it driver trees. Some people call it belief maps. You know, there's there's many different ways to describe this type of diagram.
It's it's not new by any means. But the basic idea is the stuff you're doing impacts a set of inputs that then impacts the North Star, which then contributes to sustainable mid to long term growth. So why do we do this? Well, we addressed the problems in the beginning, but doing this gives you a shorthand for your strategy.
It allows your team to surface beliefs and assumptions. And like I talked about that that multilingual problem, but really, if you if you pick the right North Star, is a glue between the work and then sustainable progress of your business. So it links that kind of business and product view.
It promotes aligned autonomy. You notice that those teams had inputs that they could focus on instead of solutions to build. And finally, I'd say that the best aspect of this is it creates a common language. I work at a company that uses a North Star that we'll discuss in a little bit, and it allows us to have discussions and allows new people who join the company to take part in those discussions, which is a big bonus.
So just as one thing adding to that is is that if you join a company and you're you're building x, y, and z, having this type of framework allows you to trace that thing that you're building into an input, into a North Star, through a set of assumptions and beliefs onto sustainable growth for the company.
And that's extremely powerful, you know, for for anyone, really. So I'm going to give you two examples here to explain exactly what I mean, and you can follow along. So picture a bank, and imagine this bank allows you to align your banking choices with your core values.
For example, if you care about the environment, it allows you to spend and save and invest in ways that are aligned with environmentally friendly causes. This is an actual company, actually. So this team gets together and they start brainstorming, you know, what are the pieces of the puzzle here?
What what what are the parts of the formula for mid to long term success for us as a product? So you can see here that they start to brainstorm things like, well, we know we need to be able to fund accounts quickly. Makes sense.
You don't want to wait months for money to get into an account. And second, you can see that they they mentioned this thing called integrated into financial life on the right. So think of all the things related to your financial life, your giving, your savings, your budgeting, your paying, your spending, your borrowing, your investing, etcetera.
So they understand that they need to integrate into that. Now moving around clockwise here, understand they want to acquire customers. So most businesses want to acquire customers and they realize they don't want to spend more than market rates for banking customers. Otherwise, they won't be successful.
And then they've got this see insights and act. So you can you can see that part of their special sauce as a company is to allow people to see the results of their spending and investing. Is it aligned? And then they have kind of trust.
We all want to trust our banks. So you can see funding, integrate into financial life, acquisition, understand and act, and reliability and reputation. And over there on the left, you see this kind of primary bank thing, which is interesting. So what is that?
Well, what this company realized is that it's one thing for people to put some play money into a bank account, and it's another thing to to become a real bank for people. That's when you start to move a lot of money into the causes that they care about.
So they realize they need to become a large percentage of someone's financial life, and that became the basis of their North Star. So they refined this. You see their North Star, it happens to be on the right in this diagram. We are their primary bank.
And then these elements, funding effectiveness, understand and act on insights, financial life integration, trust and reliability, and conscious consumer acquisition. So these are the parts of the puzzle. Now, if they did all the stuff on the left correctly, then they thought and they believed that they'd become their primary bank.
And then they added measurements to all of these. Now I'm not gonna go into all of these in-depth, but the really important point here is that they had a set of beliefs, and once they crystallize those, they attach what I would call minimally viable measurements to each of these things.
Now the measurements might change as they learn more, but the idea will remain the same as long as their strategy remains the same. Great. Another example, so you get the idea of it. I work at a product analytics company that helps teams do more impactful work.
Okay? Not too complicated. Now, just like the bank, we realize we have to do a couple things to make sure customers are successful. We have to get them going. Makes sense. We have to help them create insights and charts so they're creators or producers.
Makes sense. And then once you produce something, know, a dashboard that never gets viewed is like a tree falling in the forest without anyone to hear it. You need people to consume those insights. And it's here if you do all that correctly, you're gonna be successful.
Now the big learning for us is that it really is all about learning. It's one thing to use an analytics product and query all day. You don't actually want the person querying all day. You want them to be sharing learning with other people on their team.
So that was the big for us as a company. So just like we did with the bank example, we have learning users, which was our, you know, big moment of North Star, you know, success here to think that up. And you have it's kind of similar to the bank, actually.
You have to activate accounts. You have to get people broadcasting their learnings, and you have to get people consuming the learnings. And just like the bank, we layered in measurements. And, again, I'm not gonna go in-depth to each of the measurements, but you can see that you can imagine activated accounts.
They kind of get up to speed and get a certain number of learning users. Broadcasted learning is sharing our dashboards and notebooks and charts with other people. Consumption of learning is the long tail consumption of the learning. And then our learning users were people who actually did a combination of those things.
There are people who broadcasted learnings, and the learnings they broadcasted were consumed by a certain number of people. So we layered the measurements in there. So hopefully, you're getting the idea of this North Star framework. Now quick activity time. We're gonna do your North Star in one minute because it's not that hard.
So one way I do this in workshops is I ask people to imagine what is your product's promise. Now promise is a pretty loaded word, and I load it up on purpose because, you know, it's one thing to just kind of hack away at your product and, yeah, maybe that will go somewhere.
Right? But the best products create and offer a promise to people out there in the world, and they fulfill that promise. Back to those examples. Right? The the fintech company was promising to align their investments and savings, etcetera, around their causes for Amplitude, our promises to help people learn.
If we stop helping them, then we've broken that promise. So just imagine your product's promise for a second, and then imagine the things that go into being able to make sure you can keep that promise. So if you can do this activity, you're actually well on your way to coming and thinking about the North Star.
The best North Stars represent in a way the product's promise. So that's something for you to think about. Now for the remainder of the talk, I'm gonna talk about three important topics. At the end, we'll get into actually some tips on how to run the workshops yourself, but I'm gonna get into two important principles that you have to understand to be successful with something like a North Star framework or or any of the similar types of frameworks.
The first principle is this idea of the the leading indicator of mid to long term sustainable growth. That's extremely important to wrap your head around. The second is this idea of persistent models versus point in time goals, which will help you maybe understand the difference between the North Star framework and things like OKRs.
And then I'll give you some tips, for running the workshop yourself. Now back to this diagram we had before. Great products are the result of many, many years of good decisions, and anyone who's done this for a while knows that. There's so many things that you can chase in the short term, like revenue or anything that come at the expense of long term growth.
And if we're too reactive in product, we risk losing sight of our core and our mission. And another sort of sadistic element of this is that good decisions can often fail. Luck is a huge factor. You know, revenue can materialize suddenly and then go away, or we can get lucky with a couple decisions and then not lucky with other decisions.
So part of the reason we go over this when we think about the North Star framework is that that ideally, back to this this diagram here, the North Star metric is almost a little bit out of reach. It feels a little bit it's, of course, it's a leading indicator of sustainable mid to long term growth, but it's not something that moves every day.
Right? It's something that we have to work at, that we have to focus on these inputs that will move that North Star metric. So for example, at my company, Amplitude, it's you don't join Amplitude and suddenly start moving weekly learning users. You usually have to focus on one of the inputs, which we believe and we've actually demonstrated or we've proven that that has an impact on the North metric.
So this is one important concept to get. Now the next concept to get is this difference between persistent models and time based goals. Now North Star framework is a persistent model. Back to that constellation analogy, it sits there above the horizon so you can sail away and do your things.
Now time based goals would be things like sail here, sail there. We're gonna we're gonna sail thirty knots, I don't know, or not. We're gonna sail thirty nautical miles today, two hundred nautical miles tomorrow. We're gonna go to the lighthouse by that point.
Those are time based goals. The North Star framework is persistent model, and it stays constant as long as your strategy stays constant. And OKRs, for example, are a time based goal. We're gonna we're gonna move this metric during this quarter. One way to think of it is that OKR you could set OKRs about a team's attempted efforts to move an input, but the input would remain the same quarter after quarter until your strategy changes.
And this is vital because a lot of teams go crazy with time based goals that, you know, every quarter's ninety one business day ninety one days, sixty one business days, and they spend the last ten business days of the quarter reinventing the wheel about what their particular goals are gonna be when, really, those things shouldn't change that frequently.
That creates a huge whiplash effect. So this allows us to simplify goal setting. It allows us to build familiarity around our goals, and it it allows teams to learn over time how they can impact those inputs. When you dream up an OKR from scratch every single quarter, you don't get that learning loop happen happening.
You don't get the opportunity to learn whether even if that's the right measurement. You might find that that's the wrong measurement, but it's the right idea. So that's the difference between time based goals and persistent, models. North Star framework is a persistent model, and you can fit your time based goals into that.
Now, for the remainder of the talk, next two minutes or so before I'm done, I wanted to go over some tips if you're gonna facilitate this in your environment. You know, certainly, I wrote the book about it or a book. It's not the book. It's not like the newest thing ever.
But these are some things I've noticed doing lots of workshops as part of my role at Amplitude. The first is that you should ideally bring a cross functional group in into the room when you're gonna do this type of activity because there's all sorts of bets that are gonna be related to this idea of the the the value exchange.
Your salespeople might see it a little differently than your developers who might see it differently than your designers. So it's important to get that, broad perspective. Another important reason why you bring a cross functional group into the room is that this thing has to hold water with everyone.
If it doesn't pass the muster of the people there, then they're gonna have a hard time committing to it. The second thing is I really like this idea of brainstorming your product's promise and keeping this very human. You know, I live in California.
Silicon Valley has a lot of this kind of growth hacking and startup stuff, you know, conversion this and getting people you know, there's all this, like, kind of stuff in metrics around basically getting people's attention or driving them into your product. And I feel that that distracts a lot of teams.
You really have to get to the human promise that your product is making. Best products keep a promise and don't just sort of waste people's time. One great tip is to think about terrible North Star metrics. One way to get people loosened up and think about the idea of what the right North Star is to let them think about what a bad North Star is.
Sometimes that would be revenue or sometimes it would be the number of users they can drive to a certain part of the product that provides no value. Another fun tip is to actually look at what you're doing right now. So play the ticket game.
So start at the work you're doing right now and trace that up to something. What what bet is that work being connected to and try to work those through? The the final three tips, one is to experiment with the idea of statements in in words before measurement ideas.
Right? So you noticed in that financial that fintech company, I was able to describe it without even discussing the measurement. We wanna be their primary bank, which is a function of our ability to fund their accounts and provide insights and integrate into their financial life.
And if that statement can pass muster, the measurement falls into place. Once you can get that statement right, then you can tweak that little little by little and then consider the measurement thing. And that's the last sort of idea I'll leave you with is that if you think of the North Star framework, it's it's a map of your beliefs that you have right now.
And so in between the stars are kind of your your causative or your the the relationships between these particular variables. And as you learn more, you might tweak how you measure those things. You might tweak your inputs. You might tweak even your North Star.
But this is an iterative process. And so if in the beginning, even if you just have a qualitative measure, hey, we're gonna go off and interview these ten people, that could be sufficient. So with that, I really, really appreciate appreciated the opportunity to be able to do this talk.
Yeah. I I've been fascinated by Turing Fest for a long time, and so this is my opportunity to do it. Twenty twenty is not, like, the best year to have tried it. I would have loved to have have been there. But I, appreciate this opportunity.
And if you have any questions, you can always reach out to me. Twitter's a good way. John Cuddlefish is a good way to get in touch with me. Thank you so much. So we're going have a chat with John now. He's standing by over in he's in Santa Barbara in California.
So John, if you can hear me, are you come on in. So that was, that was a lot of great stuff in your North Star presentation. Something maybe to dig into, something you and I spoke about a little bit previously, which is if you're a pretty substantial product organization, like you've worked Zendesk and companies of that kind of scale, there's a whole bunch of things that you just talked about that are very obviously relevant.
If you're an early stage org, like you're a ten person startup or twenty person, you've just started, your product's been built, but you're trying to get your first customers know, and you don't have a lot of that sort of all the mechanics in place, etcetera.
How can this be applied early on for small startups? The best the best advice I have is to think about the North Star framework as almost a belief map. And so I always use the analogy of, you know, a friend says, oh, I I wanna have I wanna have live a healthier lifestyle.
And you say, what what's a healthier lifestyle? And they might say, well, I need to eat better. I need to, I think I'm gonna need to sleep more. They list these types of things. And so those things combined actually form a belief, It forms a sort of set of beliefs about the relationships between sleep and feeling healthier and and whatever.
And so what I like to say is that it doesn't, you'll always have beliefs about your startup. You'll always have it's either implicit or explicit, and so you might as well make that explicit. And so in things like Lean Startup, you know, anyone who's done a Lean Startup Canvas notices there's a bunch of boxes you fill in with a set of, you know, assumptions, hypotheses, etcetera.
And I like to even step back and imagine those as as almost like a a graph or or a set of, you know, boxes and arrows, about how things are related. So the what I say to to to startups is just just get your current strategy and beliefs out of your head and make it visual.
You know, what's creating value for your customers? What are the almost think of it as a formula. You know? What are the pieces of the formula? How do they fit together? And I don't think you need to be a huge company to do that.
I think the big difference with startups is that, your beliefs change pretty quickly, And that's a good thing and a bad thing. The bad thing is you go into one kind of customer, validation exercise or get out of the building, and that customer says, oh, I don't I don't like it.
And you run off to your teams like, well, okay. Pivot. We're gonna do something else. So I I don't advise that. And then the other thing, though, is is that your strategy does change as you learn things. So I like to say that your north star and the inputs should stay constant as long as your strategy is remaining fairly constant.
And when it changes, your beliefs change, and therefore, you should change your North Star inputs. Hopefully that answers your question. I think it's just about getting your beliefs just in that example, like what's your beliefs about a healthier lifestyle? Just get it out of your head.
What's your belief about your startup and how the pieces fit together? Get that out of your head. It will help even when you're very early stage. Yeah, I mean, I think at the start of a company's life, it's one of those conversations that keeps happening again and again and again, right?
Like, what do we believe? What do we think of our product? What do we think of our customers? What do we think they care about? And it takes a long time to figure all those out and there's lots of false starts. I always joke that I always have the Lean startup example of I'll be I mean, I was doing more consulting.
You'd meet founders and they're like, we wanna do Lean Startup because it's so intellectually rigorous. We're gonna have assumptions and it's like science. And then literally four days later, they're they're they're like, screw it. You know, we're gonna Yeah. We're we're changing course, you know.
So it it's a lot it's intellectually stimulating to think that way, but when you're in the the thick of it, it's a lot harder to be sort of scientific about how you work. It is, it is. And it is for early stage businesses, but it also, you know, if you, for example, run a conference and there's a pandemic, quite a lot of, there's quite a lot of zigzagging goes on in your company that year.
So that goes back to one of the fundamental questions or principles in your framework, which is the North Star itself. How do you know, are the signs that you need to shift your North Star? Because if you're hanging your whole strategy on that, or I guess that it comes out of the strategy, but how do you think about that?
Yeah. The it doesn't, it's gonna sound like a very simplistic, answer, but it doesn't pass the rigor test. And I think we've all worked in environments where someone says, well, this is this metric that we care about, and you're looking at it and you're just thinking, I that makes no sense to me. I I don't understand that.
I don't understand why what what are the assumptions attached to that? So we've all been there. And so what you tend to notice at that point is that in an organization that that has that has a north star that started to slip is you just see people having less faith in it.
They discuss it less. They're they're less confident when they see it go up or down that they know what the hell it means. So that's how you know that you found, you've you've slipped into the wrong one. Actually, in a lot of the workshops, a lot of the ends of the workshops are just testing out this question of resolution.
You know? Is it too leading or too lagging? And sometimes that's another thing that you'll discover that you're on the wrong track is that you feel like people are too focused on the near term movements of that north star up and down. So that's a good suggestion.
Maybe your your approach overall is just too near term. Or you'll notice that people have have kind of lost faith in that North Star because the ability to shift it just seems so abstract. And so that's another thing. Now I think that that you know, we brought down to to strategy, but I think that that is typifies a challenge with startups North Star framework or not, that they sometimes they're just too in the weeds, and then sometimes they're too big picture, and it's about finding that very sort of the happy place.
And so I would I would say you have to pass the motivation, rigor test. You know, if you get ten people in the room from across your your startup and you're looking at that North Star and you're thinking about it going up and down and changing, you know, do you have a majority of people in the room sort of confident about how it's put together?
And when they lose that confidence, you need to change it. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of like with everything with startups, there's a lot of intuitive gut feel on these things, which is hard to put into frameworks.
But I see what you mean. There's a question that's come in from Catherine Stables, who is asking she said, I'd love to know your thoughts on how you deal with the North Star metric where that requires certain inputs that are outside your control.
And should you avoid having that as your that'd be question. Oh, yeah. That's this is gonna get slightly theoretical for a second. But if you can imagine imagine a couple variables. You know, does the company have a strategy or not? Yes, no. Is the strategy halfway plausible? Yes, no.
Is it implicit or explicit? You know, is it implicit? Everyone knows it, but they don't talk about it. Or is it explicit? Everyone understands it, and it's sort of very tangible. The final thing is the structure of the company aligned around the strategy.
Now I think that that question actually boils back to this issue, right, that you have examples of where the company's strategy is actually semi reasonable. It's semi explicit, and it's there, obviously. But the teams aren't structured in a way to actually be able to influence it.
There's either too many dependencies or fifteen teams need to work on something. Or even in a startup, I mean, I've seen startups of twelve people that have already decided that they're gonna have a back end and a front end team. That's fourteen, twelve people.
It's kind of insane if you think about it because so many things can change. You need everyone in the same room talking together. So what I would say in that environment is step one is make it explicit. Even if you can't structure around the North Star, it's better to at least make that visible and be honest with everyone in the organization that you're not actually able to structure teams or influence those inputs in the way you think they are.
The second way is once you've made that visible, usually that has the effect of having people rethink that question, like, why can't we structure teams to impact that input? And then I would say that the final step is, you know, if if that persists I mean, someone has control over that input.
And that's kind of the the crux of it, that if you can make at least get the beliefs out of your head and acknowledge what the inputs are, then you can at least be have a just better discussion about who that person is, what the collaboration is like with the other teams, etcetera.
So hopefully hopefully that addresses the question, but but aligning the structure of your company around the strategy, and then if you're a startup, keeping fluidity so that you can restructure based on strategy is so important, and people underestimate that when they lock down things or they hire people for specialist positions too early.
And, yeah. So that's that. You'll hear a large military airplane going over the head, so hopefully it's not too loud. Okay, next question. That's good. It's, we've all we've all become become accustomed to all these quirky sounds in the background of his life.
You the Something that you mentioned in your presentation was that one of the functions of the North Star framework is to create a kind of a glue between the work and the business. Much of a challenge is that generally do you think for product managers and product leaders?
And and is it one of the key benefits of the framework? Well, so there there's been this and potentially, some some speakers have spoken about it already, this idea of being product led company. And I think that that's an abused phrase. I mean, people think it means product manager led, which it doesn't mean.
You know, there's all sorts of strange interpretations. But what it really means is that you're imagining design and technology as a source of sustainable differentiated growth for your company. You know, you can pump a lot of money into sales and a lot of money into marketing, and, you know, that you can get results from that, but it's it's pretty hard to be the best marketer in the world.
And so differentiation through design and technology is a big deal to get that. So I think that the question then comes around the product manager challenge is largely about advocating for design and technology being a source of differentiated sustainable growth. And this even happens in startups.
You know, the startup, is pretty sure they say things like, we wanna be product led or we care about the product or we care about design. And in actuality, it's sort of like a marketing play, or it's a, you know, sales play to do that.
So I think that the challenge on the part of product is advocacy and showing, not telling. It's one thing to go and tell the business, We can do all these amazing things. We could have a whole new business if we wanted to. And it's it's it's very different from just saying that and actually showing it with your team and and doing that.
As an example, just what it one example stood out to me recently is there's there's a company that I know of that is maybe ten years old. But over those ten years, they've gone from earning sort of one dollar per unit of Thing to fifteen dollars per unit of thing with very low incremental extra marketing spend or sales spend.
That type type of multiple to go, you know, fifteen x the money that you're extracting out of some kind of system in exchange for value that your product brings is not something that you're gonna do with with marketing in many cases. So I don't know.
Long and rangy answer to the question, but I think that part of your thing is how can you show the rest of the business that you can create the step change design and technology. Yeah, I guess a follow on question from that is in your career, so you've had a pretty varied and at this stage lengthy career in product, given that it's a relatively new discipline in the world.
You're at Amplitude now, you've been at Zendesk, you've been at Pendo, you were in gaming once upon a time. Are the repeat problems that you've seen in product teams? And maybe the flip side of that question or another way to frame it is what what do the best product orgs have in common from your experience?
Wow. And this is this is multiplied by talking to dozens of teams as at at my role at Amplitude. Jeez. First of all, the reason why I'm struggling answering this is that product is hard everywhere. And especially in Amplitude, when I get to talk you know, I talk to some of the, quote, unquote, best teams in the world, and they're having all the same problems.
They they just make it look better from the outside. So it's really hard everywhere. The number one problem I I would is is just really lack of focus and not slowing down enough to really think about whether what you're doing is is valuable.
And just this level what you notice when you talk to these really high performing teams is just a level of discipline without, you know, crippling, structure. So that ability to balance the discipline of learning is moving through the learning loop and thinking strategically without all this sort of oppressive structure seems to be that thing that that really differentiates these teams that figured out.
Obviously, you know, they've got passionate designers there and passionate engineers. One of the big things is you meet a company and they say, well, we're not Google or Netflix as if those are the only places in the world that can hire, you know, designers and engineers.
And that that's just not true when you talk to teams. You know, you can see these extremely junior teams that have maybe one product leader that gives them air cover on the opportunity to experiment and that opportunity to build that discipline and that that, you know, kind of going through the build measure learn loop and these things.
And so that's the answer that I have. And someone joked the other day, it's like in Ana Carina, they say that the, you know, good families are all the same, dysfunctional families are all different. But in product, it's kind of there's a lot of common dysfunctions, like too much work in progress, kind of overwhelming teams.
But what makes the great teams kind of culturally good or what were the ingredients that created that spark in that particular company is not something that's easy easy to replicate or copy. It's a pretty emergent thing. So I don't know. Pretty pretty rangey answer to your question, but I would say how can you build the discipline in air cover to kind of just focus is the hardest thing for teams.
It's very reassuring to hear though that, you know, all of these kind of high end, high powered product teams around the world are making the same mistakes or struggling with the same problems that, you know, a five person struggling with. Have a lot more money to place a lot more bets.
Like, it's kind of funny when someone like, you know, Google Google has failed five times more than your company, but they've been able to place, like, a hundred times more bets. Yeah. So that's scary for a startup when you think about it. But it's sort of, you know, you don't hear about all that stuff, largely.
No. But you do hear a lot of a lot of the time about people who come from those kind of mega organizations, and they go into startups. And they they encountered the same kind of problems, they're like, let's just do all these experiments.
And the startup was like, well, we just don't have the resources to do ten percent of that. So no, we're gonna have to find another way. I'm gonna tell you, someone, that this is one that stuck with me for the last year. I was speaking to someone from from Amazon, and I said, how's it going?
This is Amazon. This is amazing. And he said, it's going good for Jeff, you know, not so good for me. Like, we're we're one of fifty teams thrown at this type of problem, and forty eight of them are gonna, you know, not do well or end up maintaining something they're not too psyched about.
So that just use that for some reference that the grass may seem greener, but it's not startups are such a wonderful opportunity even because because they for I actually think that startups, the scarcity is what creates the amazing things. The scarcity and needing to if you can create that focus, that's really what makes it magical.
Where startups become difficult is when suddenly they're sort of flush with money or they're doing successful, then they start to make all these mistakes of lack of focus. But the scarcity is actually a gift and you have to, like, embrace that early on because you'll never have the opportunity to focus like that ever again.
That makes sense. It does. It does. And that's a positive take on what for some startups feels like a problem. But I totally hear you. And you see it when a company raises a huge round of money and they go, particularly if they've gone from being the scrappy startup, and then all of a sudden they've got one hundred million dollars in the bank something.
And The joke is you're going to spend your money in twelve to eighteen months anyway. So all that thing of like when someone says, oh, we've raised, you know, dollars twenty million, like, let's are you going spend it in twelve months or in eighteen months?
Because you don't raise that money for nothing. Like someone's expecting Yeah. That to create these sort of asymmetric growth things. So it's yeah. You're in a lot of mid late stage startups, it's about how quickly you can spend the money you raised, to do that.
So, anyway, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I thought I agree. I agree. We'll we'll so I think we're gonna wrap it up there for today, John. But this I'm saying this to a lot of our speakers. It's like we, you know, we gotta get you over to Edinburgh for for next year's He's really planning on it.
This is gonna be like Yeah. I know. I know. I literally had visions of my little son. Like, he's school picture. School picture. Tremendous. Look at that. Look at that little guy. We were imagining like, you know, walking through Edinburgh with him, like how cool that would be.
So anyway, his his brain would have exploded. Well, cool. Yeah, my pleasure. We'll make it we'll make it happen. There's there's gonna be plenty more Turing Fests. And most all will be in person. Let's see how that all plays out. But for today, John, thanks very much for joining us.
Yep, my pleasure. This was great. I enjoyed it. Thank you. Cheers. Bye bye. Okay. So that's that's a wrap on today's rather eventful production, but three tremendous speakers, tremendous talks. If you missed any of it or any of those technical issues cut cut you out, then it's all available to watch on our online platform.
So we'd Mark Logan, we'd Chris Savage and just there, John Cutler. We're gonna wrap for today, but come back on Thursday to see so Val Geisner, think there are still a couple of spots left for her roundtable about email marketing. And then Erin Platts, who's the head of Silicon Valley Bank in Europe, giving her unique perspective, frankly on where the UK and European tech scenes are right now.
