S01E03 — Going from 1 to n
Week ending 27/9/2024
Here’s another weeknote. I’ve realised that making this fortnightly has made me a bit lazy about writing, but it also gives me time to mull over the content and connect the dots. Often, I’ll revisit some rough notes I jotted down in a burst of energy, and somehow, they make more sense a week later. I’ll resist the urge to stretch this out to three weeks because, by then, laziness would outweigh any benefits from my extra mulling.
As a quick recap, we had a great two-day FtRS event at our delivery partner’s office. Good hospitality, well-organized. We did lots of journey mapping, persona making, roadmapping which lay bare some of the assumptions the team held. When reflecting with my manager in a 1:1, he brought up an interesting point that stuck with me — he remarked that our team was being “pragmatic but not philosophical”. It seemed like an odd comment so I ignored it for sometime, but later, during a chat with the interaction designer, it became clearer. He asked me, “Are we called the Direct Search team, or are we the Service Finder team”. In that moment I answered “We are the Direct Search Team managing the Service Finder Product”. That’s when I realized what it means to be philosophical.
Our remit isn’t just about the product; it’s about the experience we’re providing. It took me straight back to Good Services by Lou Downe
— A service is something that helps someone to do something
We help users find the right service. The Product — Service Finder is a way of achieving that, there could be many more and they are all our business.
Its often easier to associate our work with nouns or the tangible thing we make. But the reframing to verbs is essential to move away from what we are doing and into what we should be doing. One way for the team to get into that mindset is by encouraging curiosity, and that’s exactly where my next set of experiments will be. Watch this space for more insights in building curiosity cultures, including failed attempts.
0 to 1, 1 to n, n+1
If you’ve been around startups, you’ve probably heard of these terms. Well, maybe not the last one, because I came up with that.
It’s an understatement to say no two days are the same in a PM’s job, but when your product is in different phases, it might as well be a different role altogether. While I’ve provided the markers of the different stages, from a mindset perspective,
We move from mostly philosophical in 0 to 1 to mostly pragmatic when reaching n+1.
While this might seem like a gross generalisation, it does help frame how the PM role will differ. For example, in an n+1 product, you would find yourself with established KPIs, validated goals hence any new work is incremental in pushing those goals. But in 1 to n, there is still a lot of scope for discovery and opportunity space exploration that could lead to reimagining the product.
When I joined Amex after leaving inC2 (my startup), I made a deliberate decision to focus on n+1 products — those mature enough to sustain themselves. It’s no longer about being scrappy, even though that mindset often gets romanticized. Building something in a garage (the classic Silicon Valley cliché) or creating your first click-through prototype is exhilarating. If I’m honest, I was caught in that too and it lead me meander around startups for a very long time. But the ambiguity was often soul crushing, the question of how to get people to pay for your service (including investors) woke me up in cold sweats each morning. And its too important to ignore, hence I thought I’d spend some time learning from products that have that all figured out.
In n+1 products you gain the space to truly understand what made that success possible. The barrier to entry might be lower, but the stakes are much higher, so everything you release needs to be intentional. Corporates can feel slow and bureaucratic, but that doesn’t diminish the value of the experience.
Any successful product should go through the three phases. If it doesn’t, its a project, not a product.
Lately, my role has been identified as the one responsible for taking the product from 1 to n. I’ve been reflecting on what it truly means to scale a product. The lights are somewhat on, and now it’s time to figure out the flywheel.
Scaling from 1 to n isn’t just about adding new users, it’s unlocking sustainable growth. This distinction is essential because boosting a flywheel that’s not meaningful for the product can lead to wasted effort despite whatever illusion of growth it provides. For instance, you might have a product with a lot of Daily Active Users, but if you don’t boost Average Revenue Per User, your product would have no money left to support its own growth.
The PM job is easy in some ways, you can set BS metrics that you know will rise and then prove success by showcasing them at senior leadership meetings. But the harder part is being philosophical with those metrics and really digging deep into where value lies. For our product, I’ve tried to stray away from user count and focus on usage instead. This definition helps bring more focus to the kind of behaviours we want to see, even if it comes from a smaller more engaged set of users. A KPI that the team before me was focusing on is number of transactions, which the Government Service Standard prescribes as a critical indicator of service success. But I’ve found that it’s not sufficient. Sure we need to count number of transactions, but not before we answer other fundamentals like: What are the types of transactions? Why these and not others? What constitutes a meaningful transaction?
A critical piece in answering these questions is data.
While qualitative insights help you move from 0 to 1, it’s the quantitative data that drives the transition from 1 to n.
Currently, we’re not measuring our value curve appropriately because we don’t have the right data foundations. But I’m hoping to change some of that with the help of a rockstar Business Analyst and lots of support from the wider Urgent Care team.
That being said, scaling is not just about numbers; it’s about differentiation. Your competitors start to notice you or you start to notice you have competitiors. You suddenly become important enough to have to justify your position in the market & that’s when you need an edge. In fact, the true competitive advantage may not lie in the 0 to 1 phase at all; it could very well be found in mastering the transition from 1 to n. It’s a bold claim, but I stand by it.
Interesting Stuff Consumed
Writing a weeknote late gave me enough time to binge-watch, toilet read and jog listen to stuff. Here are some highlights —
Reading:
- London Calling — Great way to immerse myself in the different environments that immigrant writers found themselves in the city and how they decided to portray it.
Listening:
- Clean Agile — Worked in a lot of different agile settings, wanted to understand to the roots of agile with a book written by one of the original authors of the agile manifesto.
Watching:
- Silo — Great watch if you’re into layered storytelling with a bit of intrigue. Liked it so much that I’m now reading the books.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in this weeknote are my own and do not represent the views of my employer.
