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Build to Deliver Value, Not What You Want

By Ana Ramos - Glitzi
CEO and Co-Founder

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By Ana Ramos | CEO & Co-founder - Thu, 12/15/2022 - 13:00

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I started Glitzi thinking that because I had met thousands of entrepreneurs and analyzed thousands of startups while I was a VC investor, I had the basic knowledge about how to build a startup. I was convinced that by having a technical co-founder, I was already in the little percentage of startup teams that succeed. I was totally wrong. 

At the beginning, my co-founder and I built a simple Wordpress platform trying to solve a problem that customers of beauty and spa services had based on my personal experience as a Latin woman going to the salon and spa for many years. We started to gain traction and the MVP started to fall short on the needs of the business, so we decided to build our own platform. We hired our engineering team and started coding. It was me, my technical co-founder and the engineering team — no product team at all. 

Quickly we ended up falling into the delivery factory trap, measuring the engineering team by the number of features delivered in a certain time frame and thinking that the more we deployed the better,  never asking ourselves if those features were adding real value to our customers or professionals. I remember one feature that took the engineering team two months to code and was a total failure (0 percent adoption rate) but that in my mind made a lot of sense. 

It was hard for us to make the decision to change from having an engineering team building what the commercial department asked for to having a proper product team (since we needed to use every cent wisely). Nevertheless, once we had our product team in place, we began noticing how it was far more effective to interview, investigate, prioritize opportunities, prototype solutions and test them and then iterate to deliver real value incrementally instead of spending months on features nobody was going to use. We started to get better at delivering value and we started to understand that it was not about just hiring a bunch of people with a CV promoting  an infinite list of courses on product discovery, agile methodology, design thinking, technology and so on, but rather understanding how these people were able to connect the dots, share their findings with the whole organization and align everyone to take the next step as a team. 

We realized product people need to be able to answer one big question: What is the best way to ensure we deliver real value to our customers in the most efficient and profitable way? We ended up realizing that it was not just about using the latest and more famous frameworks (those are tools that help us make less risky choices about what problem/opportunity to be addressed next and what approach to use to waste as few resources as possible), but about making sure that the whole company was aligned and motivated to collaborate to make it happen. 

Remember the quote, "products exist to solve real problems for real people?" Well, the key is to address these problems and opportunities as an organization in a way that makes sense as an ecosystem: economy <> market <> customer needs <> product. In our eyes, the smartest way to do this is to make sure everybody understands what is the core expected outcome of their role, who they will need to  work with and what is the best way to collaborate to make it happen.

Everyone in the company should be able to answer questions such as:

  • What is the company mission and vision?

  • What problem are we solving?

  • Who are the clients?

  • What benefits do they get from the solution?

  • Why is our solution better than others?

  • Is the Product B2B, B2C or B2B2C?

  • What is the company's sales funnel like and how does it work?

  • What are the company's main business metrics?

  • What is the customer journey?

Finally, the big takeaway for us is that the product team is not the most important team in the company. The most important team is the company as a whole, aligned as one single team to improve week over week its ability to collaborate and make magic happen. However, the product team is a facilitator to show the path and align all departments. 

Of course, we are not perfect, but we went from building what we thought we needed to build to building what research, experimentation and iteration tell us delivers greater value. More importantly, the whole organization knows and gives feedback about these findings. Our most important meeting is not the all-hands but the customer feedback meeting, where all teams that have direct contact with customers or professionals share with everyone the result of research, interviews, surveys and that features follow-up. Then we give the space to absolutely everyone to share their points of view, feedback or ideas. 

Quoting Einstein: “If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”  I would add to Einstein's quote: Also understand the context and work hard aligning all the teams to deliver these solutions in the best possible way. 

Photo by:   Ana Ramos

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