2. Tolerance: Only ship things that ensure a customer doesn't churn OR drives incremental revenue.
3. Churn Inducing: Move fast and break things.
As you scale a SaaS business you begin to go multi-product, it's just the natural evolution. As you do that, you have some products that people love, and others that are unstable. So how do you deal with this?
I've found classifying your products into these buckets works:
#1: Happiness: The customer loves the product. It may not do EVERYTHING but they couldn't imagine a world without it.
#2. Tolerable: The customer isn't happy but they won't churn.
#3. Churn Risk: There is a high chance the customer will churn because the product is on fire.
When you have intellectually honest conversations and classify your product lines into these buckets it helps you find reality. That's important as a Founder, CEO, or Executive. A lot of people/things are constantly trying to warp reality (most often not even on purpose!).
So back to the three schools of thought...
If you set the expectation up front that you're only going to release products to the world when their great then everyone knows the bar. Apple is the north star here. When they launch a product it's near perfect. This option sounds great but it takes a TON of time and money.
If you set the expectation that you're going to ship at customer tolerance and only enhance products when there is churn risk OR a new revenue opportunity, then everyone knows the bar. This is a lot cheaper / faster than the latter option. This is where most b2b companies sit.
For a while there was the "move fast and break things" mantra echoing around Silicon Valley. It wasn't the intent, but a bunch of founders said lets ship stuff as fast as possible and they ended up with a bunch of high risk customers. It's obviously the fastest/cheapest path.
Company stage also has a big impact here. In our early days, we definetly shipped unstable products fast. We didn't have time or money to get them to 'tolerant' or 'happy'. We had to prove traction in the short term to raise capital, to even get the product to tolerant.
It's a TOUGH balancing act. But if you map out your philosophy to the company, everyone starts to really understand why you're doing what you're doing.You go from folks incredibly flustered with certain products to seeing the bigger picture.
It becomes about "WE" versus "I".
I've also found that your product philosophy can change 1-2X a year in the first decade of a company. It's pretty rare to see one specific philosophy live on from beginning to end. But defining it, explaining it, and ensuring the whole team executes on it is so important.
What bucket does your business fall in?
Why have you chosen that?
One ‘How To’:
If You Remember One Thing This Year, Remember This…
If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically. “The use of gentleness and friendliness is demonstrated day after day by people who have learned that a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”
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