What Type of Job is This: My First Year as Chief Product Officer
https://caseyaccidental.com/chief-product-officer-first-year
One dirty secret behind the work of many executives and product leaders is that our strategies aren’t that innovative. There are a few playbooks we generally run to improve performance in companies depending on the business situation after we’ve gathered the right insight. You can run through them and rule most of them out like the con men strategies in Ocean’s 12: Yes, product leaders also rule out strategies because we don’t have enough people or can’t train a cat that quickly.
The new Eventbrite strategy was a combo of two common strategic playbooks. The first part of the strategy is what Chris Zook calls “profiting from the core”:
“The greatest strategic error stems from an inaccurate understanding of the core and its full potential.” -Chris Zook, Author of Profit from the Core
The idea behind this strategy is that many companies as they scale pursue too many expansion strategies and leave behind growth that is closer to their initial core business, plays more to their core competencies, and requires less work and less risk to execute. Eventbrite was pursuing expansions in verticals (music), business model expansion (SaaS), and value props (driving demand) while ignoring improvements that could help the growth of the core product (features for small, frequent creators). At Pinterest, VP Product Jack Chou ran a version of this he called “make the basics great”.
The other component of the strategy is probably most known from a blog post (and soon to be book) by current Snowflake and former ServiceNow CEO Frank Slootman. In Amp It Up, Frank Slootman basically divides up his strategy into three elements:
- Improving velocity
- Raising standards
- Narrowing the focus
Personally, I would flip the order and revise the language to be more software specific:
- Improve focus
- Raise quality bar
- Reduce tech and design debt (usually the biggest hurdle for velocity inside software companies)
Recently, Etsy has run this same strategy combo to grow its market cap from $2 billion to $25 billion in four years after many years of no market cap growth at all.
There is one other element to Eventbrite’s strategy, and that is presented by the table above: sequencing vs. parallelizing. There is a reason Eventbrite started to pursue a lot of these adjacent opportunities in the first place: fear the core business could not grow itself fast enough. But in trying to pursue multiple adjacencies at the same time, it not only failed to make the progress it wanted on any of them, but many were not set up for success because they would gain from other strategic elements of the plan already having been completed.
