Every Product Decision Should Be Questioned Pre-PMF #startups

1. 0:00 – 0:30

   Pre-PMF mindset: nothing in the product is sacred

   1. DADalton0:00

      I think very few things about a product should be sacred when a company is pre-product market fit. Everything should be questioned. And oftentimes in the zombie company, they're just assumptions about how the product should work that, like, haven't been questioned in years. You know, I was talking to a startup the other day, and they were showing me their onboarding flow, and it was a fucking... It was just, like, a nightmare. And they had tested it, they AB tested it. It was like, this is the local maxima

2. 0:30 – 0:48

   Onboarding as a local maximum: A/B-testing the wrong thing

   1. DADalton0:30

      of this bad s- dis- uh, onboarding flow. And crazy enough, they were working on a completely different kind of product as just, like, an offshoot for a, a couple weeks, so they had to build a new onboarding flow from scratch. And then they were like, "Oh, we can, like [laughs] -"

3. 0:48 – 0:59

   Fresh rebuild reveals unnecessary complexity

   1. MIMichael0:48

      [laughs]

   2. DADalton0:48

      "... Like, our onboarding doesn't have to have all this stuff. We don't have to ask 65 questions about this. Like, we don't actually have to do it this way." And you could see them being excited 'cause they were like, "Oh, that means our current onboarding flow could be, like-"

   3. MIMichael0:59

      [laughs]

4. 0:59 – 1:08

   Finding and removing 'sacred cows'

   1. DADalton0:59

      "... 10X better." [laughs] And so to me it's like, can I try to find some of the sacred cows-

   2. MIMichael1:05

      Yeah

   3. DADalton1:05

      ... and, like, unsacred cow them? Like, look at them with fresh eyes.

5. 1:08 – 1:12

   Prompting teams to name what feels unchangeable

   1. MIMichael1:08

      Yeah, you almost wanna get them to name what are the sacred cows.

   2. DADalton1:12

      Yeah, yeah.

6. 1:12 – 1:19

   Fearless thought experiment: what would you change if you weren’t afraid?

   1. MIMichael1:12

      Like, let's do a thought experiment. Let's pretend you weren't afraid. What would you change about your business?

   2. DADalton1:17

      Yeah.

   3. MIMichael1:18

      Let's do the exercise.

   4. DADalton1:18

      Yeah.

7. 1:19 – 1:26

   The 'we can’t change it' story—and why it’s often wrong

   1. MIMichael1:19

      And they, and they... People can always come up with ones like, "Oh, I hate that, but I can't..." You, you have all these justifications that those are unfixable or immovable.

   2. DADalton1:26

      Yeah.

8. 1:26 – 1:32

   When you’re already dead: downside is limited, so change more

   1. MIMichael1:26

      But hey, if you're already dead, what, what's the harm of changing [laughs] some of those things, right?

9. 1:32 – 1:53

   Low runway as a catalyst: break-glass realism and dropping half-measures

   1. DADalton1:32

      You know? Break glass in times of emergency.

   2. MIMichael1:34

      Yeah.

   3. DADalton1:34

      [laughs] Like, and I think what's, what's interesting, and, and oftentimes we joke that we see companies make the most progress when they have low runway. I think when you have low runway, that's like the moment where you actually realize.

   4. MIMichael1:47

      You're like, [laughs] "Haha, time to get real."

   5. DADalton1:49

      Yeah. [laughs]

   6. MIMichael1:50

      [laughs] All those half measures, we can't do those anymore

Episode duration: 1:53