Thread by @bbalfour

All product work is not equal. There is a common issue of over-applying one process, measure of success, and strategy to all product problems. @far33d and @onecaseman wrote a monster post talking that is well worth the read -> reforge.com/blog/product-w…

Full thread 👇

"A common conflict I've seen is when product leaders try to apply a single process to all product work...growth and feature work are different and energy is wasted trying to force-fit into the same process, success metric, and approach." - @far33d

There are four types of product work beyond product-market fit:

1. Feature Work
2. Growth Work
3. Scaling Work
4. Product Market Fit Expansion

...

1 - Feature Work

Once a product reaches initial product-market fit, feature work creates and captures value by extending a product's functionality and market into incremental and adjacent areas. But there are some common core mistakes...

"Every feature casts a shadow."

Shipping features is not the job. Once a feature is shipped, there are always follow on costs.

Maintenance costs, user costs, killing cost...

When ignore, the feature shadow creates issues:

1. Distractions and thrashing
2. Product Complexity
3. Friction for Users

...

"Left unchecked, product complexity leads to disruption. The history of tech is littered with companies that got disrupted by more streamlined products (Yahoo -> Google, MySpace -> Facebook, SharePoint -> Slack, Match -> Tinder, etc)."

- @ravi_mehta (Former Tinder, FB)

In a lot of situations, there should be way more work on evaluating and improving existing features vs building new features. When you do build new features, what is the 1+1 = 3 sequencing story?

2 - Growth Work

Growth product work creates and captures value by capturing more of the existing market. You are typically connecting customers to the value that already exists in the product, rather than creating new value.

Lots of misbeliefs about growth:

1. Growth is not part of product's job.
2. Growth is just about more features
3. Growth is about ruthless optimization

Growth work begins with a clear understanding of your growth model. Once you have that you can:

1. Identify the constraints
2. Identify the method to solve those constraints
3. Experiment to understand if the method actually solves the constraint.

...

3 - Scaling Work

Scaling is important because it ensures that the product team maintains the ability to ship new things across features, growth, and product-market fit expansion work.

Scaling is more than just tech scaling. There are three types:

1. Technical Scaling
2. Process Scaling
3. User Scaling

The hardest part about scaling work...

...is timing. Too late to scaling work = problems. Too soon to scaling work = problems. You scale the team to take on a new threshold of feature and growth work. So you need to understand what that threshold is.

4- Product Market Fit Expansion

To continue to fuel growth of the organization, product-market fit needs to be expanded in a non-incremental way by expanding into adjacent products, markets, or both.

...

Product Market Fit is not constant. Consumer expectations are always growing. So you must grow with them.

There are a few ways to expand Product Market Fit:

1. Same product, adjacent market.
2. Same market, adjacent product.
3. New product + New Market (however this is rarely the right move)

It’s essential for product leaders to recognize the different types of product work necessary to make a product successful through its lifecycle.

@far33d and @onecaseman are putting together the @reforge Product Strategy program here -> reforge.com/product-strate…