I'm Hubert Palan, Co-founder and CEO of Productboard. AMA! 👋

[hubert (Hubert Palan)]

@rajaraman

It’s great to learn that you were in a Steve Blank class; someone who has single-handedly influenced and shaped a great deal of founder thought. As the lean startup principles were meant for the highly uncertain, early stages of a startup, I’d be curious to hear how you’ve adapted those principles today when much is settled in terms of direction? In other words, how do you think about sustaining innovation at this stage?

Steve was (and is!) awesome, you are right that lean startup (or Steve’s Customer Development process) is focused on the early stages of a venture. Which btw is the gap I saw when starting Productboard and what we then captured in the Product Excellence framework - What I learned from Steve is the customer-centricity, the maniacal focus on customers and their needs, and then I added to it the aspects of longer-term vision and importance of a clear product strategy that gets you to the vision. The framework of 1. Vision 2. Strategy 3. Execution with the three key entities cutting across (1. Customer 2. Need 3. Product) works regardless of the stage of your product and you need to be very systematic about it. Which btw doesn’t mean that following a specific process will turn you into Steve Jobs, you still need to have the empathy and be obsessed by observing the world, but it does lower the risk of building something nobody needs.