This diagnostic tool is designed to enable you, your team, and your entire organization, to make regular, incremental improvements to the way you work, the way you lead, and the way you design, test, and deliver products to customers. Following these best practices, diagnosing yourself in each topic area, and setting a few goals for improvement should enable you to move toward becoming a more mindful product company.
If you just want to jump in on your own...
Choose a topic from the left menu, and start browsing through our best practices.
Any time you feel ready, start a diagnostic test for that particular practice. Answer a few questions, and compare your score against others. You can also share the diagnostic with colleagues.
Create a few measurable goals for each best practice to help you improve your score in that area.
And, of course, if you need help from Startup Patterns along the way, there is a button to book a free consultation with someone from our team.
If you want more details on how we designed this tool, and why we it is the way it is, read on...
A product company is an organization where the business model (the way the company organizes its people, process, and technology to produce something of value that it can sell to customers) depends entirely on the successful development and sale of products. And in this context that will usually mean digital products, though many of the concepts within are applicable to building any technology product.
A product company is distinct from companies that sell services. And it is distinct from sales-led companies. For sales-led companies, while it is critical that salespeople have products to sell, the development of those products is not as important to the strategy as the sales process used to sell those products. Sales-led and product-led companies end up looking quite different in how they plan and prioritize work, and recruit and train their people, and build their products. This diagnostic is for those who are currently running, working in a position of leadership within, or want to build product companies.
To be mindful is to reserve a certain amount of mental energy at all times in order to remain aware of one's thoughts, feelings, and opinions, as well as those of the people around us, while we are engaged in any particular activity. To be successful at something, at anything, you need to be mindful while you are doing it. And that certainly goes for building companies, product companies or otherwise.
This, diagnostic (and the book it is based on) is for anyone who is involved in such endeavors, including startup CEOs and the senior leaders of tech companies, investors and board members, engineers, product managers, and designers, sales and marketing people, and anyone else whose job contributes to, and depends upon, the commercial success of a product company.
The stakes are too high to play it safe anymore. We now live in a world that is undergoing profound transformation. One quarter into the twenty-first century, everything seems to be in flux. In the 25 or so years since the first Internet boom, nearly every facet of our lives has been impacted by technology. The Internet has upended shopping, banking, healthcare, transportation, energy, security and policing, dating, parenting, agriculture, eating out and eating in, entertainment, creating and distributing art and music, fitness, insurance, and even fighting fires and fighting wars. And now, we're faced with possibly the biggest shift of them all, as artificial intelligence and machine learning promise to accelerate that pace of innovation that was already quite dizzying to most observers.
In this context, debates about the nuances of technology product development seem painfully small, almost embarrassingly so. Do we prefer Scrum or Kanban? Is SAFe a viable process model for enterprise Agile, or the root of all evil? Is it better to start with a huge product vision from the outset, or iterate our way from a vague notion of customer need to an emergent product that surfaces over time? The answers to these and other ideological wars waged by people in our field may seem trite in comparison to the ravages of climate change. But they aren't entirely unrelated.
In truth, while the debates that are waged on social media between product managers, engineers, Agile coaches, business leaders, and sales gurus about one framework or another may seem esoteric, they actually do matter. Insofar as choices we make about how we work together to build products for our customers are based ultimately on our values and principles, the methods we choose will both reflect and amplify those values and principles beyond our immediate concerns. The effects will be felt by others on our team, throughout our entire organization, and in fact by everyone who comes into contact with the objects of our art.