Finger Pointing. Part 4.

You can’t blame our investors, you can’t blame Sales, you can’t blame Customer Success, perhaps you could blame Product? Certainly, when I arrived at Ve, there was a huge Product/ Commercial divide. Commercial wanted every single feature you could imagine under the sun, Product wanted to build the most amazing product that a small niche of customers really wanted, not just what other people had. Ok, I exaggerate, but you get the picture.

18 months after I’d joined Ve, and after some very fruity conversations between Product and Commercial (and me), we were in a position where Commercial knew what we were selling, and product knew what we were trying to sell, and everyone was on the same boat. Ok, again, I exaggerate, but it did feel like we were in a decent place. We had (and had always had), a product that could stand on its own two feet versus the competition. It looked great, it had good features and functionality, and our managed service approach meant it was easy for customers to get the most out of it. This all sounds pretty good. And yet… the product wasn’t selling. So, blame product? It would seem a rather short-sighted and cursory assessment to do that.

I won’t keep going through all the different functions of our business trying to pin the blame on any specific one of them. It would be a pointless exercise.

What I hope has come across from these last four parts of finger pointing is how this could be describing any business really. These kinds of product / commercial, investor / board, sales / client success backwards and forwards and finger pointing goes on in businesses everywhere.

You are going to find very few businesses where product don’t think “if only sales didn’t feature dump in our pitches and actually did discovery”, or where sales don’t think “if only product would just deliver these features that our competitor has I’d be able to sell to so many more clients”, or where customer success don’t think, “if only sales sold what we could actually do, then new customers wouldn’t be disappointed and then churn…”. These are problems that every business faces and that every business struggles to solve every day. But solving these problems won’t necessarily give you an amazing business and NOT solving these problems won’t necessarily stop your business becoming amazing.

So, what is the secret sauce? In the next part I’ll use the 5 Why’s to try and untangle where it really went wrong and what I’ve learnt through the process. I’ll then even be able to talk about how that’s helping me in the awesome new role I’m involved with.