When I started managing products after spending years building software applications as a developer, I struggled with having developers not deliver on expectations when due. It is funny but that is the truth.

I believe one of the causes was that I built an MVP that was released to beta users in under 2 weeks so I believed that if you understood the technology stack then you should be able to deliver in time that I have set. Note the word I. 

I will talk about some of the results of this mentality in the later part of this article.

However, the main reason for this article is to open your mind to the fact that shipping a product is not linear and you have to consider several factors that can affect your product delivery. This is why I have broken this topic into the following:

• Importance of managing expectations

• Dangers of Not Setting & Managing Expectations 

• How to set & manage expectations

• The importance of follow-up in managing expectations

• The business owner’s Hat vs the PM Hat  

Importance of managing expectations

You need to understand that if you don’t set expectations, someone else is setting them in their minds.  

You wonder how possible this is but let’s take this situation as an example. You give someone money to buy a skincare product, and you probably have been delivering that product within 1 week but currently, you have envisaged something might make it take longer but you did not communicate with the customer. When do you think the customer already expects the product? That is it. 

Again, you need to understand that when building your product, you are working with humans and they could be internal teams across engineering, sales/business, operations, marketing & design. In some cases, there are external parties that could influence your product delivery. Do not also forget customers because you could realize that what you are aiming to release from your roadmap is not what is important to the customer at that particular time. 

What I am saying in essence is that expectations are set with the collective consideration and participation of stakeholders.  You enjoy the following benefits when you set expectations well.

1. Roles and responsibility clarity: Every stakeholder gets to understand the part they have to play to ensure they hit that goal. The clearer the picture, the easier it is to identify the humans or objects in the image. That is how it works for product delivery. This is why agile teams try to set product visions and roadmaps ahead of releases just to serve as a guide and ensure the team understands that the roadmap is a guide and might not be followed exactly the way it was created. 

2. Value To Customer & Avoid Compromising Quality: Agile is big on building quality products and most importantly building a product that is of value to the customer. A poorly built product could hurt the team or business along the road. 

Dangers of not managing expectations 

The question is what could go wrong when expectations are not set and managed properly? The simple answer is chaos. I will break it down into points. 

• Compromising Quality: In business, the first to do something does not always matter. What matters is who stays, innovates, and wins eventually. Not setting expectations might mean you would have to rush your team to deliver on something that is not realistic. I have fallen into this trap several times and many times we can’t seem to control it but it is a messy road. You end up releasing product features that are not valuable enough. This often happens when teams skip important processes the feature should have undergone.  

• Product Rescoping: Not getting a clear picture of what is to be expected from the team on a particular goal is dangerous. It is the easiest way to waste your time and the team’s.

  Product scoping involves considering as many factors (controllable or uncontrollable) that could influence the release. For example, you have scope a feature that was meant to be worked on with a date set for the release and the team is working on it, and in the middle of the product release, something else comes up that involves moving the current sprint to the next release and prioritizing the new one.

  There is a good chance that when you come back to that sprint you have to consider what has been recently released into the product and how the previous sprint fits into it. The whole team would also go through this exercise.

• Miss the deadline: No expectations mean no timeline set. Take for example, you have a major demo with a huge potential partner that would deepen the distribution of your product and there is a release important for the demo to be successful. Your team mentioned it briefly in a meeting and did not consider the resources to ensure the demo is successful or consider what is a priority. By default, the expectations of the external stakeholder will be dashed.

• Pressure/team churn plus blame-shifting: I believe a neutral person should handle the product at times so they can manage expectations but of course, many teams are not as big so the founders take up the responsibility of managing the product. In my opinion, this is the easiest way to put pressure on the team if there is no extra care. This is me speaking from experience.

• Unhappy client or customer: This is one danger that is the birthright of a product team or product manager that does not set expectations and manage the expectations of stakeholders. You need to consider your cost of acquisition (CAC) here so you don’t keep spending to get new customers when you can retain, get new ones, and keep growing. If you are the only product in the market though or have a unique IP, you are good to go. 

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How to set & manage expectations

We have answered why setting and managing expectations matters and also the dangers of not doing so but we cannot skip the part of getting to understand how to set and manage expectations. 

To understand how to set and manage expectations, you need to take the following into consideration:

1. Understand what is important & focus: You need to understand what is important or everything will seem important. Ask the question “What is important to us now?”. Then probe further to the point where your team and you make up your mind on what to focus on. Focus is a very hard thing for many product teams but always works when it is taken seriously.

2. Understand Controllable vs Uncontrollable Factors: When setting expectations, your team needs to know what the controllable and uncontrollable factors are. For example, an integration of a 3rd party payment processor in your product can be an uncontrollable factor or legal agreement.  

3. Under promise & over delivering: This is a unique skill that is important in setting expectations and managing stakeholders. You want to stand your ground on what you believe would be executed at the due time but work towards delivering those deliverables and beyond. 

   For example, for a product to be fully ready for a demo with a client, there are highlighted things but there is time constraint to get it done. What you do is highlight the most important things that would ensure a good demo but work towards completing some other parts that could enhance the success of the demo. The MoSCoW method of Prioritisation can also be useful here. 

4. Product Roadmap as a guide: Product roadmaps are guides and not the rule. The roadmap is one of the first steps to managing the expectations of your internal team. Some product teams make their roadmap public just to manage the expectations of their customers. Whether that works or not, is a topic for another day. 

5. Understand the resources available: I fell for this several times in my career. You need to understand the resources available across engineering, sales/business, operations, marketing & design teams. Most importantly, the strength of the resources on the team. If you want to do a quick hack, you should be able to determine the resources that will help you hit your milestone faster.

6. KISS (Keep It Simple & Stupid): Keep your stories and tasks stupidly simple. You want to avoid as much ambiguity as possible. You can learn more about writing a good user story here.  

The importance of follow-up in managing expectations 

Many times, follow-up can be the reason you are able to hit a particular goal. Daily scrums and of course project management tools like Jira allow the team to know and measure the progress that has been made so far. 

However, follow-up is important while managing your product. Many times, product managers are both givers and receivers of follow-up. 

In the same light, following up is a skill that can be improved so you don’t become a burden to your team members.

The business owner’s Hat vs the Product Manager’s Hat 

When the product manager is the business owner there is bound to be confusion in setting or managing expectations. This is because it is easier to be pulled from Sales, Investor relationship management, operational responsibilities, and other external or internal factors. 

This can easily cloud how the founder works with the team to set and manage expectations. It is a hard thing to separate being the business owner and also the product manager at times but it is important to mention it. 

Many times, founders find a way of hiring a product manager that handles managing the product and they are more involved in setting the product vision. 

Notes

• Your product is like a child, you don’t have full control of their life but you can make decisions that would ensure their journey is more blissful. You want to ensure that you continuously create an environment where everyone enjoys working on the product. 

• Again, setting expectations does not mean being Slow. You can set expectations and execute very fast. If you are executing extremely slowly you might need to dig a little deeper into different things like your processes but first, try to define what slow is. 

Finally, I have dived a little deep into some of the mistakes I have made so far in my career in building products and recently in this article. I have also talked about how to set and manage expectations. 

I would love to learn some of the mistakes you have made in setting expectations or managing expectations.

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I have found community useful to a lot of people and to me especially. I also make it very important that when I am exploring a new path or learning something new that I check and join communities that will make my journey accelerated or less stressful.

It is definitely a lonely journey to the top but community can make it a lot smoother. I would be sharing about the following in this piece:

• What is a community & What a community is not

• Why you should join a community

• How to be useful in a  community 

• Physical vs Online/Virtual Community

• Communities to join (marketing, software development, product, customer support, startup)

What is a community

A community refers to a group of individuals with common interest, shared goal & common characteristics. 

For example, a startup community would have people that are founders, operators working in a startup or own a startup. 

This is also the same for a software developer community. You would find people that write codes or are learning how to write codes. Same as we have religious communities and so on.

One other thing to note is that the community could be physical or online and it could be both. You don’t have to be physically present to be part of a community. This has been made possible by the digital evolution today. I belong to a community of over 19k people and I have not met up to 1% and the people in the community have been useful still.  

You also need to know that a community must have value to the members. Even though it is a collective effort from members, the community is dead if it does not serve as a place for people to learn, ask questions and get connected on their career journey.

Please also note that you don’t have to have 100 thousand members to be a community. We can have a community of 10 people or 20 people. The value is what matters, not the number count.

Why you should join a community

Human nature gets tired of staying or being at one point for a long time. This means humans want to move, grow and get to the next phase. 

This also applies to our career. We want to get to the top of whatever field we find ourselves in and many times the ability to achieve that is the power of people or community. 

We also need to see the community as more than the people in it alone but what it can be to you.

This is why it is important to know why you should consider joining or being part of a community.

1. It could serve as a learning guide/place: The best way to be grounded and make less mistakes is by learning from others. Communities offer that. You learn how certain concepts or processes are in your field of work. 

   For example, you are starting out with Paid campaigns as a marketing executive and you are looking for ways to effectively maximize your budget and get more results, asking questions in the community could provide answers that could guide you.

2. Support group / Motivation: The best communities are communities where people are open about sharing their successes. This could be a motivation to someone putting in the work but is not currently seeing huge results yet. 

   It is also an opportunity for people to ask how they went about achieving that milestone. However, it is also important that you don’t pressurize yourself because efforts compound. 

3. Opportunities: Your next role could be from someone posting in the community. I have gotten many jobs from the community as a developer and I have also hired people from communities I belong to. A community can be a hub of opportunities that accelerate your career.

4. To Share (your work/experience):  Apart from learning, getting opportunities, being motivated in a community, it can also serve as a tool to market your work, share your learnings  and experience through content which in turn gives you visibility. If you want people to start seeing you as an authority in what you do, start sharing in the community before making it big.

    

5. Influence: Being part of a community could open doors for you. What do I mean? It is possible that people take you more seriously because you are part of a particular community. You could also get opportunities as a result of the type of communities you belong to. 

6. More connections, More chances of success (Networking, Net worth): Your chances of meeting important people or people that have done well for themselves is higher, if they belong to the community you are in. You are able to share from their wealth of knowledge and learnings. 

   This definitely is a first step then you can build up by exchanging value with the connection you just created. That is when they become part of your network. I think what I am saying in essence is you are able to build meaningful connections with people you would normally not meet, if you are also able to give them value too.

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How you can be useful in a community

The effectiveness of a community is a collective effort of people in the community and there are several ways of doing this:

• Respond to questions: The first step or easiest way to contribute to a community is to respond to pain points of other people. Respond to their messages and join important conversations. The more people are involved in conversations, the more active the community grows.

• Create or Join programs: Whether physical or virtual programs, creating programs like workshops or webinars or a shorter session is a way to contribute to the community members and be part of their growth and that of the community. You could organize Twitter spaces bringing a subject expert or volunteer to be part of the conference logistics and planning.
   

• Attend community events: There is no event without people. Attending a community event is useful to the community. Many times the program itinerary of the event might not be addressing your pain point at that point but you can make the event useful to your use case assuming it is a physical event. For example, I can go to a startup event not for the talks or the sessions but to network with founders/investors that would be in the event.

• Share learnings through contents: As you grow, you keep learning. So why not share it? You sharing your journey could help people avoid pitfalls along the way and they will be forever grateful. 

• Volunteer to help: This is just a way to be useful regardless. Many times community work is not paid so volunteering could be helpful to the organizers and people doing the hard work of bringing people together. Volunteer no matter how little the task could be. 

There are also advantages to being useful to a community 

• Impact (Give value back): Impact is value you give to people. You cannot quantify impact. If impact is top of the chain for you, then this is a good avenue to do that. I have had situations when I was a developer and actively writing and some people will walk up to me and say I saw your article on technical writing and it was very helpful. Some started a career in technical writing through that article.

• Build an audience: Building an audience can be the aftermath of being useful in the community. You could find people sharing your content on socials or analyzing your views. You can then see growth in terms of interaction with your ideas or content.

• Advance in your career (get connections that get you a better job): When you keep showing up in the community, people tend to know your strong point and recommend you for new opportunities. It is one of the sweetest gifts of the community and the funny thing is that you don’t have to be close to the person that recommends you. I met one of my first investors in my Startup (Sendchamp) through community. 

Physical Community vs Online/Virtual Community

In recent times, and with the growth in usage of digital social platforms like WhatsApp, Slack , Telegram and Discord online communities have become rampant and instrumental to the growth of the career of people in the community. 

However, physical communities are very important and the most effective way to build a connection in my own opinion. This type of community is at a fast rate dying and causing a loneliness pandemic in regards to career. The Covid pandemic was also instrumental to the gradual death of Physical communities.

The advantage of Virtual community is that we live in an age of instant global connectivity and we can connect people from all corners of the world at the click of a button. 

Every virtual community should make it important to have a physical touch to it. Whether it is a conference, workshops or meet & greet. This is because that is when more value is being gotten by community members. It definitely sends a message to people that you are not lonely physically and even after we depart from each other, you can still access the community.  

Communities To Join

The list below is not extensive but the beginning to curating a list of  communities that you can join as a startup founder, developer, product manager, marketing exec, customer success exec, or just getting started in tech or seeking tech jobs. Please also feel free to share communities to add to the list. 

You can access the excel sheet to view or add other communities here.

As we come to the end of this article, I want you to know that you should maximize the power of the community to accelerate your growth. I would also love you to share your experience or the impact the community has had on you in the comment section. 

Product market fit is one of the concepts you come across starting a new business. You hear questions like “Does your business have product market fit?” Or “How will you achieve product-market fit?”

But the question, people largely do not answer is the question of what is involved in getting product market fit.

Before we go forward, you need to know that I got an eye-opener from reading Brian Balfour in his article Why product market fit Isn’t Enough.

The article does a deep and lengthy dive into the concept of PMMC (Product, Market, Model, Channel).

Moving forward, the question now is what are the silent factors that determine if you will ever reach product market fit? These are:

1. Model

2. Channel

Before I explain what model and channel mean, let me briefly talk about what market and product are.

Market refers to the scope or type of customers you can sell to. You can also refer to it as the sum total of buyers of your product.

Here you want to consider Total Addressable Market (TAM), Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM), and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) but this a topic for another day.

However, determining your market and being clear about what your market really is is very and extremely important. Imagined or Facade Market is just a pathway to failure if we are being honest with ourselves. This is usually common with technical founders.

Many times, they see solutions more than the market. They are builders and if it solves for one person then they assume it has a very large market that can pay for the project

Though it is usually not that straightforward determining your market, you might need to consider the region, the type of customer, and their habits.

Now, let’s talk about Products. This is what the customer pays for or the value they spend money on. It could be a physical item or service. Your product can be likened to the solution to the pain of your customer.

Why are Model & Channel the silent factors that make up product market fit?

Again, this is an important question that gets lost in the conversations around PMF (Product Market Fit) which we will answer by first explaining what Model means and what channel means.

Model

A model can be also called a business model. This is where you want to figure out how you will charge your customer or how you will make your money as a business.

I will almost say you should actually figure this out before going fully into the business. You might try a couple of models but it is very important that in the end, you choose a model that is crystal clear.

Your customer should be able to understand the pricing and also have the capacity to pay for it. For example, if your solution targets SMBs as your customer and you give them pricing for an enterprise business, it will definitely fail.

[Fun Fact] We also need to get out of the bubble of I have raised funds or I can figure it out along the way because, at the end of the day, you cannot cheat business fundamentals, and business fundamental says “You have to make money to stay in business”.

We can try to wing it but we will still definitely get back to the basics.

Here is something to note under the model and it is that it is not only about figuring out how to charge the customer, it is also about figuring out how high your margin can be and the factors that can impact the growth.

For Example, a product with a high cost of goods that requires you to do high volumes to make good money could be a hard one.

Channel

As a business, your channel for getting buyers to your product is crucial.

It might take some time to figure out the best channel to get your customers or the best channel to onboard them more quickly or the best channel with lower cost but it is very important to figure out.

This is where you see businesses coming out with strategies to identify these channels. They create strategies, experiment/test them, measure repeat, or kill the strategy.

Some businesses also boast how their channel and the strategy they use to acquire their customer is part of their USP (Unique Selling Point) but that is another conversation for another day.

It is also important to know that your channel could change if there are significant changes to your market.

For example, your SaaS works for SMBs and you reach out to them through community, emails, or influencers then you realize that your product is getting more mature in the market and SMBs cannot pay for the value you currently provide or your increasing operational cost. You then switch to enterprise businesses.

In this case, the channel will change. You then probably start with direct sales/partnership and then explore other strategies.

Let’s take a breath here.

So now, the answer to how model and channel play in product and market fit is descriptive.

When the model of the business is clear, it becomes easier to figure out the channel.

In turn, if the market truly exists, the channel will shape the product and there could be a successful business there.

This, therefore, leads us to an important question.

How do I figure out PMF if I am to start up today?

The question above begs for an answer around how Market, Model, Channel & Product fit together.

First, you need to understand that building a business is a journey. You also need to be able to have an answer on what your market is, what you are building, what channel will you get customers, and how you will charge them.

However, it is possible you begin your startup and you realize your business is in the following scenarios:

1. You have figured out the market and product but the model has not been figured out

2. You have figured out the market and product but the right channel has not been figured out.

3. You have figured out the market and channel but not the right product yet

4. You have figured out a model, channel, and product but there is no market there.

I highlighted these 4 scenarios above but different businesses can find themselves struggling to figure out one or two or three of these components at the same time.

This leads us to the next question of how to figure these things out.

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How do I figure out the scenario my business is in and solve it?

This is what I think you should do when trying to figure out each scenario your business is in and how to solve it.

Step 1: Ask the number 1 honest question: “If I continue on this path for the next 6 - 12 months, will this business be able to run on its own without external funding? ”

If the answer is No, ask why then you will be able to highlight which is the problem of the 4 components you are facing.

Step 2: Pick each component and ask what exactly is missing.

Is it that my customers do not have money? Or is it that they have alternatives and my product is nice to have? And so on.

These are tough questions but answer them honestly.

In this stage, you can also talk to your customers for feedback.

Step 3: You want to ensure you can in a way determine the market to a large extent. If there is no demand, then there is no point.

I say this because determining whether there is a market for a product can be very tricky.

You can build a product and people love it but won’t pay for it not because they don’t want to but for key reasons depending on whether it is a B2B or B2C product.

Step 4: You might want to objectively analyze what competitors are doing in that space. It could be that you are solving a problem that is not a pain point but is nice to have.

You want to ask:

1. Why are my competitors focused on what they do?

2. What exactly is the reason they have not tried to do what I do?

3. Are there restrictions? Or is there no market there? Or they are not just innovative?

4. Is it that customers don’t want it?

Step 5: You want to talk to business people that have built a business, successful or failed for insights. There is also the extra work in analyzing the feedback before taking a decision

My final question that we should also ask ourselves, before I round this article off, is “If the 4 components fit, is there a clear path to $10k / $20k / $50k / $100k non-COG (Cost of Goods) revenue within [a particular time frame]?”.

This question does not suggest you should give yourself or the business unnecessary pressure or try to force growth. This question will answer what the growth drivers are and how to access them.

Finally, this post is a summary of the hidden components that need to be given attention when figuring out Product-market fit.

After reading this you should explore if your business has answered the question of Market Product Fit, Product Channel Fit, Channel Model Fit, and Model Market Fit.

Again, these are my opinion as of this writing. I could come in the future and have a different approach to it.

Also, remember that the approach to figuring this thing out is picking them one by one to solve them and I am also looking forward to your view on and perspective on this article.

We do not choose the problem we are passionate about solving but understanding and determining the impact you will make on the set of customers you are solving for is very important.

To start with, single vertical-focused products are products that focus on a particular industry or particular type of customer. E.g Edves focuses on schools, Catlog/Bumpa focuses on Sellers, Gumroad focuses on creators, etc.

On the other hand, multiple vertical-focused products as it suggests are products that involve building for more than one industry or type of customer. I can call them industry-agnostic products E.g Payment processing platforms like Paystack, Flutterwave, and Stripe; focus on any business from industries like Education, Fintech, Betting, Real Estate, and so on. Another example is Notion is for a website designer to create websites, for a content writer to create a blog, for designers to create portfolios, etc.

Customer relationship management solutions and Vendor marketplace solutions fall in this category including Oracle fits into this place.

Single vertical focused product: One product, One Market

Multiple vertical-focused products: One product, multiple markets / more than one product, multiple markets

It can be tricky at times to classify some businesses under these categories but when you see that servicing a type of customer of your product is totally different from the others you will know.

While I cannot decide which type of product you should build, I will highlight and explain key things you need to know in case you choose any of the product types. 

Product: While building your minimum viable product (MVP), one crucial thing is time to value for the customer. You want the customer in a few clicks to derive value from your product. This is not a luxury you might be able to afford with a product that involves multiple verticals. For example: if I am building a product for merchants to sell their product, a simple MVP will be a web app or mobile app that allows them to list products and share the links with their customers. 

Another thing to note is how broad or streamlined your product roadmap is going to be. You don’t want to spend so much time building existing features that your competitors already have before you start innovating.

Single vertical products give you a more streamlined product roadmap than multiple vertical products. For instance, it will take my team a lot more time to build a payment processing infrastructure before I start innovating as opposed to building a payment app that allows you to receive money and send money.

In summary, you want to consider the time to value for a customer and the product roadmap to innovation for the business. 

Market: The market is one of the things you consider when starting a business and many times we are tempted to show an extremely huge market but you need to know that the more the market, the more the marketing spend. 

There is no doubt that you get a bigger addressable market (TAM) or serviceable obtainable market (SOM) or serviceable addressable market (SAM) but requires more marketing strategies and spending before finding what works. Finally, apart from defining your general customer personae, you still have to look into specific customer personae.

Growth Strategies: Coming up with growth strategies and executing them is very tasking. The more focused the market of your product is the easier and faster it is to come up with strategies, test and double down on them.

In summary, More focused growth strategies are a lot easier than trying to grow your customer base taking into consideration different industries, and different customer types. For example, developing growth strategies for a developer-focused product or merchant-focused product is a lot easier than developing growth strategies for a vendor marketplace product like Handy or TaskRabbit, or BookingsAfrica.

Regulations: For multiple vertical products, you are likely to have to understand the regulations around each vertical. For example, a payment processing company like Flutterwave will have to understand your business industry and determine which compliance details to require, and tailor their product for that use case. 

Another thing is that many times regulations change and you have to consider that. Imagine doing that for 5+ industries as a new startup with fewer resources.

Competition: It is difficult to compete in a space where your competitor already services different verticals of customers with  2-4 years of their roadmap in production.

You might have a chance when you focus on one vertical than having multiple verticals you are servicing. However, there are exceptions to this. One is you might be servicing a market in a different geographical location but it is important to see how well you can have a very huge competitive edge.

Pricing models: For multiple vertical products, your pricing model might vary depending on the kind of customer onboarded on your platform. Pricing is determined by understanding your market and the type of customers so you will have to build pricing models that fit all or build models for the different customer types. This is why you see some products will hardly offer self-serve because they don’t want you to drop off from viewing the pricing on their websites.

As I wrap up this article, I want you to know or note that you can move from a single vertical product to multiple vertical products. A good example is Moniepoint. They started by providing a financial services platform for agents then after years of success with it and they wanted to expand their market they moved into providing business banking & payment platform for other types of businesses.

Finally, I am happy to learn what you think about these 2 types of products and why you would choose a product that focuses on a market than one that focuses on multiple markets/customer types.

I decided to start sharing a very short summary of my learnings as I keep building and learning products. 

Today, I will be doing a quick share on what I consider the 3 stages of a product based on my experience.

1. Will it work? Stage 🤔
This is the stage most people call the MVP stage. Here you don’t want to build too much because it is the testing phase of your product and you want something minimal your potential customer can test and derive value from. Many people struggle with this phase but by understanding your business and product goals it could really help. At this stage, you don’t necessarily have to build any technology here, you can start with manual processes to test it out. 

2. It works Stage 🥳
At this stage, you have 1-10 or more customers using the product and have some positive feedback and also ask for things that either fit into your product roadmap or are based on their experience with your product. This stage is a revealing stage as you get to continue to understand your customers and the market. 

3. The Aha! Stage 🤑
This is the most exciting stage of any product as you have probably found market and product fit. Customers are paying for the product and you are seeing consistent growth based on the Metrics you set. Not a lot of products eventually get to this stage due to a lot of reasons but once your product gets here, you have hit gold. 

If you feel there are some things I missed, do not hesitate to share in the comment. Thanks 🙏 

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