#21 Le Produit, vu par l'un des meilleurs VC
Basé sur "The Series B Blueprint" de XAnge.
👋 Hello,
Bienvenue dans cette édition #21 de la newsletter Pachamama qui décrypte les tendances et carrières de l’écosystème Produit !
On est désormais 1287. Que tu sois là depuis le début, ou que tu viennes de me découvrir, merci de me lire 💜.
Au programme :
1- Les conseils Produit d’XAnge aux founders - english 🇺🇸
2- Les RDV de juin à ne pas manquer - avant le break estival ☀️
1- Structurer son Produit en vue d’une série B
Tu es founder, PM, Designer, PMM ou CPO dans une entreprise ayant levé sa série-A… et tu te demandes quelles sont les étapes attendues pour parvenir à la série B ?
Tu es au bon endroit.
Un bon Produit, des bons process, et une équipe Produit bien structurée sont le moteur de l'innovation, de l'acquisition de clients et de la satisfaction client.
Et ça, les fonds d’investissement le savent mieux que quiconque.
À l'approche de la Série B, les investisseurs examineront de près comment ton équipe s'aligne sur les objectifs de croissance et répond aux exigences du marché.
Voici les 4 axes Produit essentiels donnés par XAnge dans son blueprint à destination des founders de startups.
Un point de vue essentiel à connaître… pour mieux faire son job côté Produit, construire son équipe Produit et optimiser ses changes de réussite.
Tu ne connais pas XAnge ?
C’est un fonds d'investissement early-stage européen, certifié BCorp, basé à Paris, et Berlin. XAnge a financé 5 licornes et plus de 10 entreprises listées au Next 40 et au FT 120.
Merci à eux d’avoir accepté d’en partager un extrait avec vous.
🇬🇧 English only!
1. Rock solid CPO
It all starts with a CPO, and it's, by far, the most complex recruitment of all the C-suite positions, rivaling the CMO—a role with a significant turnover risk. When hiring a CPO, you're seeking someone who will embrace your vision as a founder, challenge it, and disseminate it throughout the company.
Three types of CPOs:
Disruptive CPOs: Launch new offers/markets, create value, and enhance the USP. They can think outside the box while maintaining a focus on the bigger picture. However, they might introduce unpredictability to a team and may prove challenging for you to manage.
Entrepreneurial CPOs: Valued for their pragmatism and hands-on approach. They can oversee complex projects and quickly structure a robust middle-management team. Their primary aim is to make a swift impact on the business.
Framer/Organizational CPOs: No longer hands-on. Their roles encompass management, strategy, staffing, product organization efficiency, and processes. Consider hiring this profile if you're planning to attract and retain top-tier product and design talent, especially when the team grows beyond 30.
2. It all comes down to metrics, metrics, metrics
Beyond the growth stage, the primary focus shifts to financial efficiency. After achieving product-market fit, the emphasis moves to scaling. While CPOs usually employ KPIs related to engagement, customer acquisition, retention, and monetization, the most value a CPO can offer lies in analyzing cohorts and customer behaviors to pinpoint your product's genuine value. As one CPO from a leading B2B international scale-up emphasized:
"Take any KPI and you should start deep diving to get into the underlying metrics that support it."
3. Swift impact
Delivering value rapidly hinges on a product-centric organization. Avoid from scaling if you're already saddled with organizational debt. The product organization is your company's operating system: your product represents your core business. Ensure that your product team promotes a culture of empathy towards customers. A frequent misstep involves scaling the team prematurely without addressing current bottlenecks.
Three essentials of a product-driven organization:
Customer-centric approach: Foster an environment that emphasizes the end user's impact. Implement robust mechanisms for collecting and acting on customer feedback.
Agile teams: Advocate for small, autonomous, cross-functional teams, integrating both tech experts and business professionals. This aids in maintaining focus and achieving short development cycles, with an eye on "time-to-impact."
Organizational design: Prioritize eliminating bureaucracy, hierarchy, and superfluous processes.
A Series-C CEO who expanded from three founders to a sixty-member Tech & Product team in eighteen months shared:
"We moved from feature teams to impact teams where a team would focus on a persona instead of a feature. We needed to have a cross-functional team to make sure we were building the right experience and bring it to market properly and then onboard and support our users properly as well."
4. Strong execution
Investors expect adept execution. How swiftly can you pivot, deliver essential features, or launch in a new market or country? Execution correlates closely with engineering capabilities and the efficiency of that relationship. Strengthen the CTO/CPO dynamic. Similarly, on the business front, efficient market integration of what's built is vital.
Execution also hinges on a strong product team. Showcase your success in assembling a powerful product team. There are two primary strategies:
Develop your team around budding junior and mid-level PMs and PrDs. This approach demands a capable CPO to guide and elevate them, along with a stellar engineering team.
Recruit fewer PMs but those with vast experience. This tactic requires competitive salaries, full remote work options, and superior engineers to lure the best. With this arrangement, you can delay hiring middle managers until the Series B round, maintaining direct team management.
A CPO who navigated a startup from Seed to Series D remarked:
"Technical debt arises when product managers fail to adequately anticipate their product's potential evolutions."
Conclusion
On top of these 4 critical topics, the most common mistake as a founder at this stage is to pretend you still know what your customers want as you keep on scaling.
Market insights will evolve.
Brace yourself for your beliefs to be contested.
Allow your product team to communicate their findings, which will fuel your company's growth and commercial endeavors.
As a SaaS B2B CPO testified, “founders are biased in their own beliefs, which quite often limits the space for creativity and new growth opportunities. The best CEOs are the ones who learn how to bring insights and then focus on where they bring more value.”
Pour aller plus loin
En tant que “Product People”, je suis sûre que tu as bien aimé la 3 et la conclusion ! 😅
Je t’invite à télécharger le blueprint de XAnge, une mine d’or pour quiconque s’intéresse au modèle de croissance des startups 👇👇
2-Les prochains RDV à ne pas manquer
📅 Le 20 juin en visio
Rejoins nous pour un live avec Q&A, sur le sujet de IA x Product Career !
🕤 Date & Heure : ce jeudi 20 juin à 12h
📍 Lieu : Livestorm
📅 Le 25 juin à Paris
Je serai aux côtés de Tanguy du Ticket et de Maïa de Noé pour une table ronde sur “Les dessous du Produit”. Le tout animé par Oscar de la BPI qui nous accueille.
🕤 Date & Heure : 25 juin à 18h30
📍 Lieu : 6-8 Bd Haussmann, Paris
Merci de m’avoir lu jusqu’au bout 💜
Toujours preneuse de feedbacks et thématiques à aborder ici.
Pour recruter (ou être recruté·e) via le collectif Pachamama, c’est par ici.
Marion