Pivoting a Post-Seed B2B2C Platform from Chaos to Customer Validation in One Month
Post-Seed Platform (Regulatory) B2B2C — Multiple Rounds, $8M Raised (Seattle)
I found this company in a very interesting state - trying to pivot from a B2C offering to B2B.
They were not meeting revenue goals with their B2C offering (a mobile app) and decided to expand into a B2B offering - basically, a SaaS that would serve the professionals of their market, rather than the customers of those professionals.
In the beginning I observed. I went to occasional meetings. I slacked team members. I grabbed a technical ticket here and there to implement.
Several things became apparent. The roles and responsibilities of team members - across distinct organizations - were unclear, with the roles and responsibilities of one org intermixing with other orgs.
I saw the acting product manager being overruled by engineering - on features!
I saw two individuals acting as product managers. The Design team was setting roadmaps without founder buy-in. Engineering was running their own show, implementing their own ideas.
I saw product handing over feature requests as a few lines in the description, pointing to very large design files, or none at all.
It was apparent there were several anti-patterns all at once:
- unclear roles and responsibilities
- overlap/contention in roles
- unsanctioned, out-of-scope work being performed
- large increments of work
- low no customer proximity
At this critical juncture - the pivot to B2B - there were many hurdles in the way.
The design of the B2B app had already been largely "done".
The both product managers were not sure what the behavior was of the various screens the designer had created.
Clearly, getting this through engineering would be its own debacle.
With such a large, poorly specified design up front, it would be months before the founding team saw any feedback from the market.
Speaking of the market, there were no external stakeholders awaiting the results. No one outside the company had weighed into the design at the outset, and no one was awaiting the results.
We needed to make several changes to de-risk the situation.
The number one mechanism I had at my disposal here was incrementalism. That is, get the minimum amount done that demonstrates value to our new ICP (a hypothesis, anyway), and get out of the building and show some users.
The second step was to coach the product team on how to continue slicing up the roadmap into valuable increments, and how to describe the intended behavior of the increments in a specific meeting called a 'refinement'.
Along the way, there was a lot of coaxing the engineering team to look at the product team as the authority on…the product, and to act more as a consulting and implementing partner, rather than a driver of product spec.
We worked over many sprints to practice roadmapping, improve the dynamic between product and engineering, and worked out some engineering challenges along the way.
For roadmapping, we spent time taking decomposing large ideas and initiatives down into smaller, deliverable increments to increase customer proximity and feedback. We leveraged tried-and-true techniques of pre-refinement and refinement to enhance the product and engineering dynamic. For engineering, there were some personnel tweaks required to align with product and eliminate any out-of-scope work.
Because of our new, incremental approach, we were able to ship much, much faster, and improve the stability of what we were building.
The biggest win here was when we encountered our aha moment. This was when, after about the third iteration with a business user, we heard the magic words, 'I'd use this.' The important thing here is that we heard it - and we heard it within a month, rather than possibly three to six.
This is when you can witness customer discovery, product, and engineering working streamlined and efficiently to deliver real value.