Over mountain peaks...! ⛰️

Why do organizations largely struggle to capture that expected market share over subsequent releases when they managed to receive an absolutely sensational response over their first product release?

Join a recently established product-based organization in the early days as a Product Manager and spend a few years in there, you’d soon learn how almost every day could be a real challenge over something new.

For instance:

• the DEV team is behind schedule, you don’t think it would be possible to launch in time

• UX team has been researching, working over their silo in order to get things in shape but factoring in the feedback over those iterations is taking far too long

• marketing teams don’t have the proper download in time delaying the curation of material to front the social media channels

• And, you find yourselves at the epicenter of that whirlpool having to interface with each and every internal stakeholder to get things in order as well as the EXECs to manage their expectations keeping everything in check

And, if you happened to join in at a growth stage startup where there have been a few releases over the past year or so and they have what seems quite a healthy Retention & MRR, the problems could vary dramatically. It could all get down to how quickly you fit into the groove over understanding the goals set and getting down to interfacing with teams over how they’re approaching the situation, getting your hands dirty with analytics, measuring what matters & setting all essential KPIs tracking them down.

When a product hits those expected numbers or even better, goes overboard & achieves the unthinkable over exceeding them by a sizeable margin, what’s everybody’s natural instinctive reaction?

“Wow!” (and that is 9.999999999 out of 10 times)

And of course, you’re celebrating the fact that you’ve hit PMF!! YaY!! 👏🎉🎂

And then the fact that you’ve hit those blinding highs when anyone least expected it to happen inclusive of yourself, begins to take over your senses subconsciously, the subsequent gradual inbound transformation which is you beginning to feel invincible over anything you set foot on.

But, what ought to be the most sensible thing to do in such situations?

Firstly, you ought to get your head down and start off by telling yourself that this is just the beginning and you’re yet to scale many of those mountain peaks to reach the summit / the zenith so to speak which is so far that it is not even in sight right now. And also importantly try and impart the same thinking to all the other team members.

But, in spite of that we have so often seen and even today witness how the subsequent feature releases over products from some orgs. totally fall flat over those adoption numbers. And that, coming from the same org. that built a super world class product with features that had rich relevance to the market earlier on is a total shocker, indigestible for some too, especially the investors / VCs to start with.

When the reasons for that could be very subjective differing over a case to case basis, here are a few generic problems, some anti-patterns.

Let’s explore each of them with solutions / workarounds as applicable.

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Conclusion

Scaling peaks with products & feature releases no doubt requires the right teams but also needs everyone of those teams’ members and the leadership to have a clear understanding of what could possibly go wrong and the various reasons why they could go haywire, so as to make it a mandatory practice for each and every team member to factor the understanding in over every major / minor feature release regardless of the stage of the product and bake it into the processes followed.

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