Product design (product)
Design studio (brand & marketing design)
There are roughly 10 members in each team.
You might be surprised to hear that we’ve actually struggled over the years to hire designers to the company, even though we are so design centric. I hope its because we set the bar too high
Our approach is based on strong design principles that we’ve developed internally that act as a mast in order to keep the quality high. Obviously you also need to hire good designers!
As far as product copy goes, we have people in the company dedicated to product and marketing copy and we somewhat pride ourselves on being on the cutting edge of product and marketing copy.
I would say both Typeform and VideoAsk have actually risen from customer insights instead.
In this case, meaning, we were thinking about what the customer would benefit from as opposed to purely thinking about the technology involved.
Both product benefit from a GTM ‘joker’ card. By that, I mean, given that both products are inherently viral (products that create distributable content), in both cases we just put the product out there, people started building typeforms/videoasks, distributing them and presto there is your viral loop. We’re lucky in that sense.
Of course just product virality alone did got us to where we are. In our case we have a particularity that makes it challenging to go to market. Both our products are very horizontal (multiple use cases…like Trello) so we have a harder time convincing people to activate down verticals where a competitor might have the use case more focused and wrapped up.
We’re now fully remote and have embraced it. We asked the entire company if they would want to go back to the office (when possible) and most opted for a hybrid model where they would mainly work from home but a few times a month would come back to a central hub to mingle, meet and work.
I think we’ve adapted pretty well. As far as keeping the culture going, the main challenge is not being able to spend time together f2f (as most of us are locked down) + there are no company events so we lose the opportunity to really bond. So we’re left with ‘Zoom’ in order to have all-hands, our "Meaningful"conference series which we kicked off last year and lastly just relying on teams to create bonds through their own online meetings.
I don’t know if there is a recipe for this. In my case I generally lean more on intuition and use customer feedback to challenge my own intuitions.
The following is pasted directly from an internal document in the VideoAsk team to define how we work:
What makes us a high-performing team?
High level of trust (allows us to have less process and less meetings & just get on with it).
Willingness to always help each other.
We have a wide range of high level skills .
We know what good looks like.
We #ownit .
We put the customer first.
We’re pragmatic .
We shipshipship.
note: I would also add here that the fact that we generally don’t all work on one feature together at the same time makes us more efficient…it makes us have more #ownership. At times we will work in pairs, but there should always be a clear owner/driver. Even though there are efficiency gains working in our silos, we should document when necessary our work, in order to allow others to take over when need be.
@dokuniev We are a bootstrapped early-stage organisation, and we are in the phase of pivoting our offering to be relevant to post covid consumer behaviour. The question was what are the key evaluation points from business/finance/market/customer standpoints that we should not be missing out while we are making decisions on pivoting?
Make sure you have a clear vision of what you want to pivot to and beyond + make sure you have enough runway to get there as you may lose some customers during the pivot (if its radical).
Go out again to customers and battle test the new vision. Make sure the product changes are something that people will truly need, not just want.
Roll out these changes gradually, descope as much as possible so you can course correct as you get feedback without losing too much time.
And finally make sure your new model can also work in a post covid world that may eventually rectify back to a pre-covid one. i.e Be careful with riding the covid wave
The path that you are envisioning, coming up with entirely new products within the bounds of Typeform, sounds great. I feel it will offer fellow founders who’ve been at it for a while, an admirable alternative to pursue.
Thanks so much for taking the time to join us for this session! And for sharing behind-the-scenes, inspiring learnings (along the ups and downs) from the Typeform journey!
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