How to give direction to an engineering-led startup without a chief product officer

So you’ve finally found your calling as a nerd and joined a small early-stage company with lots of awesome software engineers building cool stuff, super fast. You’re calendar is clear of corporate time wasting. You don’t have to be near any humans unless you want to be. Things are looking up 📈.

There’s just this one little tiny minuscule itsy-bitsy thought nagging at you. Where are we going?

You’re building cool sh*t, you know that. Is that all you need?

I am ecstatic to work for an engineering-led company building cool cloud security sh*t. As a bonus, our customers happen to love the product we’ve built! But when I joined Plerion a few months back, it was clear there was something missing in our conversations, in our approach, in understanding why we were all here.

I wanted to get busy doing my job writing interesting blog posts, researching clever cloud attacks, and making our product better. But I couldn’t figure out what ‘better’ meant. Nor how to sell an innovation to the founder. Nor how to convince anyone anything I wanted to do was the right thing to do. It quickly became apparent everyone in the company had this problem and it was slowing us down and resulting in short sighted decisions.

Step 1: Get the context

If we’re all doing good work, work our customers appreciate and work we are proud of, how can there possibly be a problem? Sounds like we need to Breaking Bad this situation and cook up some real answers.

After doing a bit of digging across our 37 different document management platforms (actually just 3 but it felt like 37), I found some prior art. I searched for terms like “mission”, “vision”, “values” and “strategy”.

We had something. You probably do too.

Okay now we are talking. There are a lot of words in that mission but I kind of get it. Maybe the number of words is why I’d never heard it before. No mere moretal could recite a mission that long.

What’s your mission? What’s your vision? Find any prior art. Sometimes it will be in the founder’s head. Sometimes it will be written but hidden away in a long lost Google drive. Maybe the website has what you need. Whatever you find, you’ll need for step 2.

Step 2: Get everyone to agree there’s a problem

Assuming you have all the context about where the company and product might be headed, and it’s still not clear to you:

1. What the heck it all means; or
2. Whether everyone else has internalised the same context;

It’s time to begin figuring out whether the problem is worth solving.

Start by asking questions, lot’s of questions. Go to your engineering leaders, your commercial team, and your founder(s) and ask:

1. What is our mission?
2. What is the vision for the product?
3. How will we know if we are successful?
4. How dow we make decisions about what we build?
5. How do we explain the value of our product to customers?

Ideally the answers are snappy like a good proverb, rich in wisdom but brief in words. Hopefully everyone says roughly the same thing. We weren’t so lucky at Plerion.

We didn’t (still don’t) have a Chief Product Officer or a classical product manager driving consensus and writing everything down. What we did (still do) have is experienced founders who understand the market and know the customer.

Our founders meticulously planned the next 3 months but expressed the mission and vision using different words. That meant the teams building and selling the product knew exactly what was next but had no view of where it was all headed. It was easy to build features but difficult to own product direction; easy to sell the technology but difficult to sell the strategy.

As we replayed everyone’s answers amongst ourselves it was obvious there was a problem and perhaps we had misdiagnosed the root cause of unrelated issues in the business. If there is a problem like this in your organisation, the questions and answers should do the work of getting agreement there is a problem.

Time to align, in a line so divine, our paths intertwine like a vine.

Step 3: Create a simple structure for pulling things out of people’s brains

There are a million ways to extract something out of people’s heads. Most of them don’t even involve surgery.

We chose to use a Miro board with six areas for areas for posting sticky notes:

1. Problems – What problems do our potential customers face that we think we can solve?
2. Beliefs – What do we believe about our product and how people work?
3. Mission – What are we trying to achieve?
4. Vision – What will the world look like if we achieve it?
5. Big hairy audacious goal (BHAG) – What unreasonable long term goal do we want to chase?
6. Product principles – How will we guide product decisions to support all of the above?

You might not want or need all of these. You may choose to call the categories different names or haggle over definitions of ‘mission’ and ‘vision’. What’s most important is that there is a structure for people to do their abstract thinking with just enough freedom to find the nuggets of gold but not enough that you’re redefining the entire business.

Once you have a structure that works for you, give everyone enough async time that they can go do the abstract thinking. We gave our leadership team a week and that worked well. It was enough time for people to do multiple rounds sticky note creation and to ask questions about other people’s stickies. Booking time explicitly in calendars can be a good forcing function for putting tools down to think.

The result should look something like the below. Lots of notes, some obvious, some wild. Many overlapping ideas and probably some themes.

Don’t worry if it’s not exactly what you expect. We had things pitched at different levels, mutually exclusive options, and different interpretations of the requirements. It’s all good. The dirt comes out in the wash of the discussion.

Step 4: Identify the things that resonate and choose amongst them

This is the hard bit.

Once folks have completed their divergent thinking, you’ll need to converge in a room, ideally an actual physical room in meatspace. It could be one workshop or it could be five. The goal of this get-together is to commit to a mission, vision, BHAG and product principles. No one is allowed to leave the island until it’s done.

Parts of the discussion are going to be epic suck. Make that clear up front. These discussions are abstract which is brutal for structured thinkers. They can become circular. Everyone has their own preferences and frame of reference. Just when you think you’ve got agreement, a hand grenade will be lobbed in the middle.

It will okay! The pain is a rite of passage. You’re shaping the direction of your product for years to come. If it was easy, someone would have done it already.

The good news is that the winning ideas are most likely already stuck on your version of the Miro board. The bad news tends to be that there are too many ideas, not too few. You’ll need a way to focus in on the best candidates from each grouping.

Before diving in head first, choose a facilitator. Someone who understands the business enough to be able to pull the group out from rabbit holes but someone who isn’t attached to any particular direction. Set the ground rules for that person:

• Who will resolve stalemates? Typically one of the founders.
• Who will take notes? Typically the facilitator.
• How strictly will time be managed? Typically the goals are more important than time.

For each area we used the following 3 step process that sometimes turned into a 5 step process 😬:

1. Vote – Vote for favored ideas. We allowed fewer votes in areas that would result in just one winner (mission, vision, BHAG) and more votes for those with multiple winners (problems, beliefs, product principles).
2. Discuss – Sort the results from most votes to fewest and start discussing them. Make sure to leave room for passionate pleas about things that didn’t make the cut. Sometimes there’s a dark horse that wins the day.
3. Choose – Depending on the discussion, the winner(s) might be obvious. But if you are struggling, try re-doing the vote and discussion again. We found that votes changed dramatically once people had a chance to question and explain. Finally, consensus is nice but often not realistic. Remember the goal is alignment.

Step 5: Document and communicate

Take a moment to admire what you’ve done. It’s something that will guide the company and all of it’s employees for years to come.

You can’t keep this great outcome to yourself. Most of the company didn’t participate in these enthralling discussion that almost killed you. We’ve started to blog internally at Plerion so that’s how our founders chose to communicate with the team. They also spoke at length during the next available all-hands meeting. It was inspiring and people were excited and relieved to have something they could refer to.

The medium you choose is up to you but here are some lessons from past lives:

• Produce a written and spoken version
• Don’t use corporate speak
• Make it interesting to consume and let the passion seep through
• Put it somewhere that’s easy to find
• Invite questions and feedback

If you’ve done this right, all that work should come down to just a few words that are easy to remember and understand. What do you think of ours?

Our mission is to simplify cloud security

Our vision is that everyone’s cloud is secure

Our big hairy audacious goal (BHAG) is to protect one billion assets

Our product principles:

1. Simple is quick time to value
2. Simple is knowing what to do next
3. Simple is all the context needed to act
4. Simple is intuitive
5. Simple solves a problem
6. Simple is where the work is

Step 6: Institutionalize the direction

This movie is not over yet. It’s not enough to tell people once about the company’s mission and vision. It’s not even enough to print catchy slogans on a posters and hang them up. For this exercise to make an actual impact, it has to become part of how you work and who you are. Stopping at Step 5 will lead you back to Step 1 in under a year.

So how do you institutionalize the direction?

• Model behavior you expect – Leaders must bring the mission and vision to life in their conversations. We started asking our team questions like “How can we simplify that?”. Our sales leaders began opening prospect calls with “We simplify cloud security”. We stripped away complexity everywhere we found it. Whatever meaning you find in your mission and vision, find ways to apply it daily.
• Measure the BHAG – Your BHAG is the company direction distilled into one thing everyone can see. Make sure they see it often. Identify and celebrate milestones. As you progress, the milestones will get bigger. Every single one is an opportunity to rally the team and fill their tanks.
• Inject it into process – Apply it to performance management. Include it in employee onboarding. Recognize employees who represent it. Make it integral to every town hall meeting.
• Update branding – This will take time. We are still working on this on at Plerion. Does your visual identity bring your mission to life? Do you write and speak in a way that represents your mission? Make a list and start working on it.

For engineers, product principles will be the thing that makes all of this real. These principles are how you fundamentally reshape your product over a long period.

• Reframe decisions – Product principles will be the guiding force nudging you towards your vision every time there’s a decision to be made. When reviewing each option (or design or user story etc), ask how it adheres to each principle. The onus should be on the decider to demonstrate why product principles should be violated as part of a given decision. This approach has drastically changed the engineering choices we have made since starting to use it. It has opened our eyes to possibilities and improved the quality of discussions.
• Update workflows – Whatever your engineering work tracking system, product principles can be templatized so they are always front of mind. For example, when a pull request is ready for review, a comment can be added asking the reviewer to confirm the principles were adhere to. The document template used for architecture reviews could have a principles section. User experiences designs could require a principles description. The details don’t matter so much as the requirement for principled thinking.

For some folks this will all be a bit of a struggle to begin with. Going from little direction to a lot, and from ad-hoc decisions to principled decision making, is a big change. Don’t be disheartened when there’s a lag or some people need more reps than others. Keep at it and the results will come.

You’ve made it to the end. You have permission to go back building cool sh*t.

Want to see the cool cloud security thing we are building?

‍