Startups : Delivering the Third-stakeholder

( Comment on a gripe about dysfunctional product management. )

-

It sounds like your "team" has weak components. Let me break down the system architecture of a commercially viable team for you.

-

Premise / Ontology :

There are THREE key stakeholders, or nodes.

1. Capitalists / investors : who pay first, whether in time, money, or other capital.

2. Staff / labour / talent : who get paid first, to execute work.

3. Customers : who pay last, and close the loop.

In the pre-commercialisation stage of a business, you only have nodes 1. and 2., ( example if you own the venture, then you are both ). But you are LOOKING FOR 3., which is a customer to actually pay cash. So this is NOT YET a viable venture, as the loop is not yet closed.

-

Mission / Ethics :

In order to close the loop, (to simplify) everyone looks at 2. The situation you found difficult was the work within team 2. This team is collectively responsible for delivering 3. - of course there are different alternative divisions of labour in order to get 3.

If you prefer to divide the labour along the lines of :

2.1. talks to potential customers

2.2. talks to 2.1. and builds prototype goods and services

This is already sub-optimal, as it DOUBLES the number of hops information has to traverse between the customer and 2.2. Lets say you're committed to this model, which I'll call the 2N situation. In an ideal state 2.1. and 2.2. are the same fellow, which I'll refer to as the 1N situation.

2.1. and 2.2. need to focus only on cycle-time, whereby a cycle is measured as : the time between (A) when there was a hypothesis about what would cause the customer to change what they're paying (0 to 1) or (1 to N), and (B) when there is evidenced cash in hand for the change.

You are right in hypothesising non-essential features for deprioritisation. But how did you quality non-essential features? I would propose the only thing that mattered should have been "did any feature change the timing of prospective customer's conversion into a paying customer."

That's the only objective at this stage, (0 to 1) or (non-viable, to viable) or (open-loop to closed-loop).

Deliver 3.