A 3-Step framework to build great product organization at hyper-growth startups

In hyper-growth startups, it’s essential to structure the product organization to support the increased demand. If you don’t have the proper structure or frameworks, the product leadership team will soon lose sight of product priorities and feel overwhelmed with daily firefighting.

In early 2020, dropshipping platform Spocket achieved product-market fit. The pandemic impacted Spocket positively, resulting in an increased number of paying customers and order processing. However, product infrastructure, operational practices, and people were not prepared to handle this growth. Every day we noticed new fires such as database breakage, infrastructure issues, and customer bugs that required us to be reactive rather than proactive. I joined in Q2 of 2020, and it felt like I was changing the tire of a moving car without stopping. The company proliferated with little organizational structure to support that growth. As a Director of Product, my job was to think of the next big problem I could solve so that the company would not lose sight of the growth stage. I had to balance the responsibility of building a short-term roadmap while solving daily fires. To avoid being reactive and continue to innovate without losing speed, I created the following three-step framework for hyper-growth startups:

1. Setup the structure to drive product practices
2. Create a single source of data
3. Build key pillars of the product management team

Shutterstock — Hyper-growth Startup

Setup the structure to drive product practices

One of the biggest challenges Spocket faced was that there was no structure to organize an ongoing roadmap, product deliverables, and gather product requirements. This situation led to back and forth between product and engineering teams. One of my first moves was to set up 1:1s with critical stakeholders across Spocket. The goal was to listen and to understand stakeholder challenges. I immediately picked up opportunities to improve across various areas, such as structuring the product discovery process, avoiding back and forth between product and engineering, reducing time to deliver features, and communicating among leadership and individual team.

Structural changes introduced:

Created a standard requirement gathering documentation template to include all pre-launch requirements and post-launch product distribution. For example,

The pre-launch requirement template includes:

1. What problems are we solving?
2. How are we measuring success?
3. What will the UX or experience look like?
4. What is the experimentation plan?

The post-launch distribution template includes:

1. What do we need to update to the Intercom bot?
2. Help Center articles or marketing video changes
3. Email or campaign updates
4. Intercom product tour configurations

Weekly project tracking and roadmap review process

I introduced the Weekly Project Review (WPR) Meeting to track weekly progress on projects and highlight Red, Yellow, or Green project status. It created a single touchpoint point to communicate all updates to stakeholders in the company and avoided ongoing questions such as what is the status of the XYZ project from multiple stakeholders in the company.

I initiated the monthly roadmap review process to communicate upcoming priorities for product and engineering and provided clarity to cross-functional teams about future product launches.

System for tracking product analytics and user feedback

I implemented a centralized system to collect all key events; for example, the Spocket dashboard had multiple upgrade events. Even if one touchpoint is down, it could reduce our upgrade ratio. We wanted to know immediately if one particular event was down so that the engineering team could fix that issue. With the help of my data engineer and front-end engineer, I identified vital touch points and implemented a Customer Data Platform to track all events.

Customer success and support teams were critical stakeholders for the product management team. Both of these teams spend more than 90% of the time with Spocket customers, and usually, they hear a variety of issues directly from the customers. We implemented the shipright.co to organize all customer feedback in one place. It became a single source of truth to track all user requests in one place to inform product decisions, build better products, and increase satisfaction by closing the feedback loop with customers.

Create a single source of data

As Spocket started growing, leadership wanted to make better data-driven decisions to double down on growth; however, Spocket had multiple payment systems and data from various sources. I had only a siloed view of our subscriptions and marketplace data. Because of its complex data environment, I struggled to make business decisions with confidence based on comprehensive data analytics. After a few conversations with key stakeholders and Spocket CEO, I decided on the key metrics that would help us to monitor business performance. With the help of a data engineer, we decided on how to store all data in a data warehousing system and create data visualization dashboards that we can use to monitor the business’s health daily. Metabase has become a single source of truth for Spocket’s stakeholders, who can now view the health of their business at any point in time. Spocket’s product team can use these dashboards effectively to review declines in any key metrics and prioritize product features accordingly. All this allows Spocket’s executive team to increase their ability to understand the business’s current performance or enhance their confidence to jump into new initiatives.

Build key pillars of product management team

Before I joined Spocket, there was no product management team. Founder-led product is a natural transition for almost 95% of the startups during their early days and Spocket was no different. It means when I joined there were no product practices and structure around how to identify top problems and prioritize them. Thus it was essential to build pillars of product management and I achieved that by focusing on the below steps.

Product discovery, KPIs review, and reporting structure

I set the foundation for continuous product discovery for all PMs in the company. We started using the Shipright.co to review all qualitative feedback, MetaBase, and Google Analytics as quantitative feedback tools and collect additional inputs using weekly customer interviews and surveys using Hotjar. The PM team also started leveraging the Intercom to review customer chats and discover customer problems.

Built a reporting structure for KPIs and ongoing updates on projects, project operational work, and discovery progress. Daily KPIs reviews allow PMs not to lose sight of our key business metrics. I used Notion and created a product wiki to allow my PM team members to report their ongoing work in a centralized place. I provided access to anyone in the organization to see this work and created transparency for others to see the product team’s progress.

Experimentation culture

A/B testing, also known as experimentation, is crucial for any product organization. A strong experimentation culture is essential for any organization that wants to improve its products continually and better serve its users. By A/B testing new features or changes, Spocket gathered data to see what works and what doesn’t work for users. At Spocket, we focused entirely on several KPIs such as signups, sign up to trial, trial to paid and churn from paid.

We created an Experimentation dashboard to track our ongoing experiments and watch our progress every week. We used VWO as a tool to perform A/B testing.

We created the following steps to build a robust experimentation framework:

1. Discovery and Research: Test Ideas, discovery, research, collect insights.
2. Planning: Roadmap planning, prioritization, and requirements gathering
3. Test Development: Review test with stakeholders, design, and engineering work
4. Test Configuration: Test live, monitoring
5. Test Results and Reporting: Winner, outcomes, learnings, data analysis, visualization

Quality control

As we were moving fast, building new capabilities, and experimenting with new ideas, chances were high to break existing functionality or introduce new bugs. I hired a Quality Analyst for my team and created a regular smoke testing process to avoid introducing unwanted bugs. As a part of this process, she started reviewing key functionality such as the payment and upgrade funnel daily; she also began testing all features weekly. With the help of a QA member, I created a process for managing customer issues and bug reports and made a point of contact for the CS team to know whom they can approach for reviewing customer issues.

Conclusion

As your startup grows, it becomes increasingly important to have a well-defined product structure and practices. The above three steps will help you get started. But as your company continues to grow and change, be sure to revisit these structures and make necessary adjustments. A strong foundation of product management practices is key to sustaining growth and keeping your team on track. Have you implemented any of these tips in your startup? Let us know how it goes!