YouSaid · the spoken record

Hubert Palan

lines on the record: 36
first: 2021-01-29
most recent: 2021-01-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And then you disseminate it, you analyze it, you see the big picture, and then you communicate back like, hey, this is what we should do. And so that's kind of just like a fun way to think about it.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think of it as becoming the Salesforce of product management, becoming the central product brain. Salesforce is the CRM and is the business brain of the company. But we need a brain that is focused on understanding the markets and their needs for the product side, for the R&D organization, everything that we talked about, who are the customers, what do they need, who are the competitors, and how do you translate all of it into the product decision making? And we don't have that. That doesn't exist. Like, where can you go and ask, oh, what are the top needs of a specific customer segment? Or what are, you know, if I build this particular feature functionality, who's going to benefit from that the most? It's mind-boggling. It's just crazy. And so another analogy is like, think of it as, you know, in Star Trek, the command bridge. And so I want to be product where like that place where all the information from the market are coming in and all the exploration, you know, the units, it's like bringing in.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you're asking about investor angels, right? But I want to highlight my wife and in general the support that founders get from the families. Because if you think about the level of investment that they put into the venture and whether it's living on the ramen or sleeping on a mattress in an empty apartment while you move into your real apartment, your co-founders like I did, it's just a lot. Death Trainer is an angel, the more traditional angel, and I learned so much from him about product strategy, the co-founder of Intercom. So I would mention him.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a complex role. It's a combination of customer empathy, design, business, technology. I'd say it's getting better because I feel like there's more and more people who understand technology more. You know, we kind of came from the world where you had like the traditional brand manager. It's basically a product manager. At Procter& Gamble, if you have diapers as a brand, you know that. But it's easier to understand the needs of the customers there than it is in the tech world. But I feel like as the new generations are coming in and they kind of understand more how technology works and how it is used by people, the easier it is to find people who understand both the nice and technology. But in the early days, you would have to be a super techie and almost, you know, because of that, you wouldn't have the empathy. And so it was then the Frankenstein product got bailed. It was like super technical, super difficult to use because they were built and designed by engineers. And just it's changed in the last 20 years.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My kids. So, you know, what we talk, you asked me about it. I sleep well because of the focus on mental health. Like, I don't wake up. In general, you know, what I think about what I worry about, it's like, how do we scale the company? How do we grow? Like there's so many things to figure out, how do we hire even better people? It's like all the things. They're just like scaling, building a successful company.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that actually I've been thinking about recently, given the election, I feel like we all in technology, we are pulling society towards innovation and we have a responsibility not to forget about the people who are not on the front lines of innovation. And so I think that I actually have like I'm on the side and working on starting a little nonprofit or a little group of what can we do to get people on the bandwagon of using technology and being more flexible in how they work and what work they can get done. Because it's like there's this group of people that are running faster because they are more informed. They have the cars dealt their way. They have the skills and the knowledge and we're just running faster and faster and faster. There's this like gigantic group of society that doesn't have the information, doesn't have the skill, and we can just like run too far away because it's gonna create a very strong tension. And the rate of change is increasing, the innovation, the speed of innovation is increasing, and we need to do something to kind of keep everybody together because otherwise, you know, I mean, you”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that stands out is high growth handbook by Elod Gill. I know whatever you heard that one, but that was just so practical for a founder. And there is a lot of the things like how to put board together and how to think about, you know, fundraising, like super practical, I would say that one.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. Look like I've been, I'm 42, I think. But I've been working on this. I've been super stressed. And in the early days of product board, you know, it's been hard. And I had a little founder's mood meter. I put into a spreadsheet how I feel and I plotted it because I'm analytical guy. It was a complete ups and down. I meditate. I talk to my wife. I surround myself with mentors and I kind of spread the burden. But I kind of got to the moment where I realized that number one, don't stress about things that are outside of your control because this completely counterproductive. And number two, any kind of stress is counterproductive if it limits your ability to think clearly. And so I'm just like doing everything I can to just, you know, be balanced and approach things from a positive, we can figure things out. But I had to learn that. It wasn't natural.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to say, if I may, to the transparency, is that it's hard in the set, like, look, I use this analogy. Imagine that you're a general you're fighting a war, and then competitors start, you know, winning and undercutting you from the right, and you show up, you would stand in front of the whole army and you would say, things are not looking good. It looks like you're being overpowered. You know, it's demoralizing, right? And that's the very hard part about it. Because if you're honest about the fact that you're going through couple quarters that are”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right. And then the second, though, is the strategic bucket. Like, if you're in the middle of closing a big round and you have investors competing for you and you're trying to keep secret, you know, from them, like you don't want to tell the whole company like, hey, you know, we have Sequoia and Kliner and Andrisen and Excel compete. And we're pitting them against each other and trying to create the best outcome for us. Like, no, you're risking that it's going to leak and it's a super sensitive time period, right? It's a very short time period though. And so you need to be careful there. But that doesn't mean that after the fact, you shouldn't and couldn't share that. You can go and then sit like, look, this happened, like this is, you know, it's strategically important to keep information confidential for some period of time. But let me tell you the stories and crazy stories that happen and be transparent so that you get people feel like they were part of it, even though it obviously, you know, not the whole company can.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that transparency is not binary. It's nothing or everything, right? It's a continuum. Look, there's some hard limits. Privacy regulations. You just can't. You can't be transparent if you would be breaking law and if you're breaking protection or like, you know, rights of people to keep private medical information. Obviously, you're not sharing that, right?”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, what are you doing as a startup founder? You're trying to hire super smart people to help to get you to your vision. And not only want to build trust with them by being transparent and honest, because that's what people appreciate and expect, hopefully, but also because you want their help in solving the hardest problem. And so if you're not sharing things that are not working, if you're not transparent about the performance, if you don't talk about the inconvenient information that you just lost a big customer or that, you know, the churn is high or just in general the friction in the business, the big problems. But what are you doing? So you spend all the effort on hiring these great people and then you completely waste their curiosity and creativity in helping you solve the best difficult problems that you have in the business. And to me, that's kind of a crime. Just like you're wasting, you know, people's abilities and skills. So that's the core for me. I can tell you why it's”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know whether it's the biggest choice, it's just like one of the challenges of Scaling a company is part of it, you know? Yeah. Look, there's other ways how to do it if you look at Invision or Figma. That's growing like crazy. They monetize active users and doesn't matter who it is. And maybe that's a way too, right? Maybe then you create kind of like a blended role where you lower the price per seat, but more types of users are going to be paying. And so overall, the revenue will increase. There's different ways of doing it.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then present roadmap directly to the customers and sales teams and so on. So, right now we have all these seats free and we are not monetizing them. But it doesn't mean that once we have the super strong foothold in the product organization and all the product makers that we're not going to come up with a way to monetize that, whether it's through another role that's monetized, whether it's through another modules or even like a whole set of modular products. And there we're going to monetize the relationships of the other contributors with the product organization.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the sequence. So we are going through the market where we're starting with the needs of the core product people. And so we are now charging by seed because it makes the most sense because the core, and that's not just product managers, by the way. You'd be surprised for how, you know, for every product manager, there's like three other people who are part of the product process. I mean, designers, engineers, but even product marketers and there's other stakeholders and there's the customer success head of customer success and then sales. They all want to be involved because product is so central to the success of the company and also to the success of their individual teams. If you have better product, it sells better. If you have better product, customer success is an easier job and support and so on. And then how you get the insights into the other teams, you need to be organized around that. It's not just the product people, but it's next for us. And so all the use cases that are around how customer success can leverage the information in product.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they like some aspect on the product of it, and it's like, oh, this is great. Can I also use this tool? I know it's a sales tool, but I could use it for marketing. Or for us”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you stumble into it, you just like, you know, you're throwing spaghetti on the wall and you see what sticks, which, by the way, is a lot of the kind of lean startup thinking is actually just like iterate quickly, right? Like the agile just iterate quickly, quickly, quickly. There's not much about strategy. It's much about high volume of tests. So my point here is that the strategic aspect needs to be there. If you just go and you stumble into it by accident because you saw something or you tried it and you don't really have that system in place that allows you to consistently go forward and validate and test and iterate in a smart strategic way, you're in trouble because what happens when you get to the product market fit is that the market at that point starts pulling you all these different directions. On the little matrix that I described, you know, it starts people start asking you, oh, can you do more use cases and kind of like, you know, more broader? And then other people who are not really the persona that the product is for see it.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Notion. You can theoretically run all the processes, but it's just not going to be world class outcome out of it. Maybe you can get away with it if you're a small startup, but when you scale, it's not going to work.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of products like the acquisition to their suite of products so that it strategically all makes sense and so that there's a more combined value created for a customer if they then use the whole platform. And then in terms of the companies that are being acquired, it also requires that there are companies that found new market opportunities and develop them into already kind of like a validated businesses that are worth acquiring. I feel like we're reaching this point, but still there needs to be a specialization. I'm still a bit like if you look at notion or coda the companies that are just like a no-code low code kind of solution you can combine or apply it for everybody I still believe that there needs to be specialized solutions for highly specialized use cases and just like with Excel like Microsoft XS I don't know whether you remember but you would build your CRM in a spreadsheet or in Microsoft Access right and then we have this specialized solution turned up you can do the same thing with”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, totally this is happening. I agree with you on that. I think that it's natural. I don't think this is anything specific to technology. It's just that, you know, in this particular SaaS world, for example, in this example, right, it's getting to the whole industry is getting to the maturity where the big players have the funds and also to your question, like when is the right time to branch out? Like, you need to have actually defensible business in the thing that you did in the first place, right? Because if you start expanding too soon, then you start competing with multiple people at the same time. And I mean, you see it, for example, in support, right? Zendesk Intercom Draft, the competition is increasing along the different use cases. It's difficult challenge for intercom, right? Like, how do you take on Zendesk? And then at the same time, protect yourself from the entrance at the bottom. But this consolidation, in my mind, so it's like, okay, are there players who can add it into their suite?”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Introduces new products to the existing audience, there's a much higher likelihood of success than if you introduce the same product to a new market because the market knowledge and the understanding of the needs of the people is more important than the product knowledge. In terms of you, like what is score and what is it where you should move, you need to understand this segmentation. You need to have the good understanding of the market structure. And then based on your capabilities, based on where competition is, how differentiated you are, you need to kind of like draw that little matrix, okay, I'm gonna go broad or I'm gonna go deepest competition, how am I gonna be differentiated? You know, again, it's an analytical exercise. It cost, and it's complicated, but it's important to be strategic.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The competing products are. And so you need to think about okay, I built the first version of the product for the first persona and for the first set of needs. What am I going to do now? Am I going to take that product and enlarge it, increase the breadth of it, and add additional needs, or am I going to go and add a new persona? It turns out that typically it's easier to stay in the same persona and add needs. So for example within sales, right, if Salesforce is building the Sales product, you could keep adding more functionality for more sophisticated Salesforce or more sophisticated sales use cases rather than jump to the marketing persona. Because we jump to a new persona and to kind of like a big segment comes suddenly new go-to-market messaging and positioning, a new set of competitors and is, you know, that jump is much bigger. It comes with the need to learn about the needs of this new market segment. And so I remember when I was at Berkeley, the marketing professor said, like, turns out that if the same company”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, this is the core product strategy thinking, like what you're asking about is that's the foundation of product strategy. If you think at how companies that we all know went to the market, Tesla, first roadster, then Sedan, then mass market vehicle, Salesforce, start with Sales Cloud, then add support services, marketing, now acquire Slack, right? Like, you know, you go deliberately to the market, not saying like I'm a system for everything for everybody. Spotify, music first, and then adding, you know, podcasts and maybe video content and so on. It's deliberate. And so the key elements there, though, are who is the customer in terms of the persona? Is it, you know, is it somebody? I'm in a B2B world, right? So it's like I'm giving a B2B example, but is it somebody who's in marketing versus sales versus customer success? And then what are the needs is the second dimension? And so the customers and the needs and the intersection is where your product is.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One little stone from each of the buildings. And then you build half of the first story and you run out of funding because nobody can move in anywhere. And so that's the thing that you have to have a bold vision, but the bold vision, you need to have the key insight that what is it that you're going to be in five years is not what you should be building today. And that's the key of the strategy.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we need to think big and bold because if you don't think big and bold, you're not going to make anything big and bold. The thing though is that I can ask you, how many times have you heard a founder telling you something like over a solution for everyone? Or anybody can be a customer? It's great that you have that bold vision, but the danger about it and the tough thing is that if somebody shows up and says, like, I'm building a flying car so that anyone could fly to work, is that that's not how you go about building the company. And that's not how you from getting the vision can be big and long term. But how you get there needs to be a thought out, deliberate set of small steps. And if you don't think hard about what is the right set of steps to get there, and if you just like start building the bold vision, you know, it's like starting to build a city and instead of first building a church and a, you know, school and a hotel and a pub, you would build from metropolis like.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I've been thinking about it for six years. And then let's talk about it. We can change it. It's not set in stone. You know, it's just like, I want you to not reinvent the wheel because if you just join the company, there's six years of knowledge and learning about the market. And somehow you need to get it. It's super hard. Like, again, I don't have a magic. I heard these stories that, you know, at Sprinkler, the founder had first marketing leader living in his basement for three months so that they could just get on the same page and talk all the time. Drew at Dropbox, I heard that when he hired Chief Product Officer, the product leader that they spent like every week, like six hours or crazy amount of time for months just talking about the vision and what's happening, just so that you get aligned as much as possible.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to be a dictator. No, no, no. I go for the look like the whole premise of product board as a system is based on the idea that the information should be shared with all the people that are involved in product decision making. It's similar like, you know, CRM system, like you centralize all the data about customers in order to disseminate it across the company so that sales see it, marketing sees it, customer support success. You have fullest picture of the customers possible. And this is missing on the product side. And so my point is that you need to create an environment where this is shared and where everybody's on the same page. And that's my way of leadership. Like I still don't have the magical recipe, but I'm trying to write down my insights that I've learned for the past six years and draw diagrams and have everybody read it. And then I write down my roadmap that I have in my head for features for the next 24 months. But it's not like this is the roadmap. It's like, hey, this is, I'm seeding the conversation with this.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, look, the best investors want to meet the team. I agree with you that the majority of communication. And also, look, it depends on the stage of the company, right? But if I look at even the early round, Series A, like Ilyafishman showed up at our office, you know, for people here at Weork. But he wanted to see the other people, he wanted to talk to people. So he did a very good diligence. And then back channel, talk to people who interacted with the company and see how people communicate, like what they stand for. It's just it's a team sport. My point is that it's how the founding people work and collaborate with the others. What is that relationship? Is it very dictatorial or is it kind of meritocracy egalitarian? Is it, you know, respecting each other opinions?”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then you need to go and find the market for it. But it needs to be, you know, it needs to be in my mind, and I'm a computer scientist, I'm a very analytical person, right? But in my mind, you need to have a systematic approach how to think about it. And the conviction shouldn't be just like an uninformed gut feeling. It needs to be very much informed gut feeling. And you need to be able to challenge all the inputs that go into the conviction.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. I think that you need to have a framework around it. You need to know why you have that conviction. Because if the conviction is just because you woke up one day and you thought like, yeah, this is the thing, or you found out that you as an individual have a need and you have an insight how to solve it or like the insight was the combination of the need and the solution. But then you need to go and you need to find out whether there's more people like you. So you need to have a way how to kind of validate that and validate just like, is it a need that's big enough, that like painful enough? Is there enough people out there that have the similar need? And do I have really a superior way how to solve it? And then the conviction can be coming from, well, I am constantly kind of validating that, yes, the need is there. Maybe I don't have the solution yet, but I see that the need is there. Yes, I see the market. There's more people. Maybe I don't have the solution. Or vice versa, you know, you might be convicted about great technology.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, look, it's important to have an insight, right? Because if you don't have an insight, if you don't uncover something new in the market, the new opportunity you need, then it's like, you know, you don't have a business. You need to do that. And if you look at Steve Johns, Mark Zuckerberg, film night at Nike, Oprah Winfrey, like Pai Al Kadek at Class Pass, they represented the target audience the early on I joke that Mark Zuckerberg was a socially deprived college kid, you know, and that's why the company built. But also look at how many startups pivot. And so in my mind, you know, while you might have the”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one, it's not just raising, right? It's like you raised it around, but really what matters whether we have the signals in the business that show you that you should be scaling. So just careful with, you know, raise money and start spending. But even though hopefully you raised the money because you saw the signals, right? But I mean, for me, it's been a challenge, like how to realize that maybe you can spend more and move faster rather than be frugal and just try things slowly. And that's one of the things I would probably change looking back. But, you know, the good thing is that if you have it in you, and as we all heard, you know, the culture comes from the top, like you kind of project it to the company. And so, I mean, look, running an efficient business, talk to any investor. Like, you know, okay, what's the ratios, sales and marketing spent towards the revenue that you bring in? It's a critical factor, right? So it's actually very, very valuable to have that mindset. And that's the story of Jeff Bezos and one pizza team, just like, you know, be frugal.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that you kind of idealize it from externally and do you think that everything is thought out and then when you realize that it isn't when you kind of get thrown into it and you ask people that you respect and that you thought was like oh my god this is a you know God and they just have the formula and they have the recipe to build the companies it just makes you like you basically go and you're more bold I feel like you know you're just like okay even these people don't know so it's up to me and I just need to work extra hard and I need to like put extra effort and then also because you have this you're super frugal you know you're coming from a world where you had to do everything you need to figure out everything you're like you didn't have the funds and so the early days and it's kind of a double-edged sword but you know the early days is kind of like okay i'm just gonna rough it on ramen but just like that's how i grew up it's just like you know it's like oh it's so hard i mean it is hard right but it's like you're more resilient i feel like you know”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Management system. It's used by over 3,000 companies to get the right products to market faster. And we have Zendask, Disney, Slack, but also traditional companies like Swarovsky, Cartier, Sherwin Williams, McLaren, people that are undergoing digital transformations. And we keep working on it.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's see what sticks way of approaching building startups in many of the tech companies. That was an interesting moment. It's like, oh wow, it's not that thought out as it should be. And then, so what happened was that at Good Data, it was startup, everything was crazy. And I remember sitting there one day looking at all the JIRA tickets, engineering task management system. And I was thinking, wait a minute, so prec management and kind of the art and craft of building new product is all about understanding the customers and their needs and then figuring out what to build for them, right? What are the features and functionality? And all the systems I've been using didn't have the customers and needs in it. I mean, it's kind of, it's crazy, you know, the JIRA is all about epic stories and tasks. There's not even the entity of a customer, the need, or the objective is kind of core entity of that system. And this was back in 2014 and now I quit and now product board is a product.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so quick background. I got master's in computer science in Prague, Czech Republic. I'm from there and then made it through four years of technology and strategy consulting at Accenture at clients around Central Eastern Europe. And then I got my MBA at Berkeley. And that was the entry to the US. And after that, I got sucked into the valley. And, you know, I'm talking about the CS and MBA background because I see that as the foundation and the combination, the technology and business combined knowledge. That was the success later on. And after the NBA, I went through a couple startups, some successful than the others, and then ended up growing to be a VP of product management and recent funded BI company called Good Data. I discovered there the reality of product management at high growth startups in the valley and just in the tech world. And I kind of learned that my idealized MBA educated and Accenture framework trained brain and approaches are slightly different from just like.”
2021-01-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source