Thread by @msuster

1/ A thread on "founder types" & how to hire those who complement you

There are no "exact types" of founders but to simplify:
A framework I think most founders broadly fall into:
1. Product centric
2. Tech centric
3. Customer centric

It helps to figure out which you have / are

2/ Many tech companies are "product centric"
- They understand how customers use today's products & where the gaps exist in the market.
- Know how to get tech built by high quality engineers
- Often win through 10x better products
- But often don't truly understand the customer

3/ In order to understand the customer you need to know:
- how they work
- what their problems are
- how to satisfy their needs
- how they get approval to spend $
- why they adopt new solutions
- how they train themselves
- how they get buy in from teams
- what choices they have

4/ I work with many "product centric" orgs.
Each time they truly believe they know the customer. In my experience they often don't. I didn't. I built better products. Then I sat in user sessions and would get frustrated that they couldn't figure out the most obvious things

5/ I realized that often my users didn't care about my features. They cared about "the job to be done" (Clay Christensen reference). They weren't in love with my product.
They wanted:
- easier, faster, cheaper, less cognitive load, less training, less remembering how to use

6/ Many "product centric" orgs don't think about the psychology of why leaders at enterprises adopt new technology
- career advancement
- controlling process
- cutting costs
- excitement
- perceived as a futurist
- willing to fight battles / change agent
- etc

7/ So I think that some "product centric" orgs end up winning despite not fully understanding the customer.

I think the right strategy if you're product centric is to realize it and hire customer-centric executives.

8/ Something I often tell CEOs

"Hiring a senior sales / biz dev professional helps greatly. They are customer-centric by nature. They will come kicking and screaming to you to improve product, pricing, customer success, training"

They PULL you into being more customer centric

9/ As @sethjs once said to me (metaphorically)

"tall people hire tall people, short people hire short people"

Best to hire people different than you. If you're product centric SEEK out others who aren't. Recognize both are a strength

10/ Customer-centric leaders aren't better than product-centric, they're different.
They start from:
- how does customer work
- how do I make his/her life better
- how do I hook them into buying / trying
- how much money, time would I save them
- how do I make them a hero?

11/ Customer-centric CEOs often come from backgrounds in consulting, sales or biz dev. They sometimes lack sophistication of how to build the best products. So they scale revenue quickly but eventually get beat by better products. They need to partner with great product leaders

12/ I won't fund customer-centric CEOs unless I have confidence that they understand the importance of product & engineering. It's like having somebody who knows how to build a beautiful restaurant & how to create buzz but not how to make world-class food. It takes both

13/ Tech-centric founders are slightly more obvious. They build stuff that has never existed before because, well, they can. This works really well when selling to other engineers or users who want to consume via APIs. It works less well when it requires more business functions

14/ I often remind tech-centric founders that often "best product doesn't win"
- Word Perfect > Word
- Lotus > Excel
- Harvard Graphics > PPT

Microsoft won

The world is littered with "best in class" tech that lost. Tech leaders who understand this partner well with biz people

15/ As I said, there is no model that wins every time. The starting point is:
- know your personal strengths (customer, product, eng)
- hire to your relative weaknesses
- make sure you give power & voice to the other roles and understand & value their contributions

16/ Sometimes the smartest people I know are the quickest to discount the value of "customer insights" (hating on consultants or sales professionals) or thinking "those customers are stupid." This is usually a recipe for an unsuccessful outcome

/fin

17/ (post script, an example from my early product days)

When windows & mice first became popular I designed systems to replace "green screen terminals."

I designed the tech I would use, all my friends would use, cutting edge, best-in-class ... the future!

The users hated it

18/ What I learned (AFTER) we built the system
- cust svc reps valued speed / knew short codes on green screens
- mice & windows were more intuitive but slowed down their operations
- our system helped a new rep but for experienced ones they could do less work
- they hated us

19/ If we would have spent time watching reps take calls & use existing systems. If we had asked why they did what they did & what was important to THEM we would have designed better systems. Not fancier, but met their needs. But we "knew better." Sigh.