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Interim CPGO

Notion Capital

Advising Notion portfolio companies. Accelerating revenue from $1m to $100m. European SaaS and Cloud. 300m fund. Series A.

Expert in Residence / Portfolio advisor

NorthOne

Advisor

Paddle

Bedfables

Imaginative bedtime stories created by AI and bundled into easy-to-read stories with beautiful pictures.
www.bedfables.com

Co-Founder

Interim Head of Product and Growth

inScreen

PLG Advisor

userled.io

Sharing Tribe

Stealth Startup

B2B Growth for Scaleups. leahtharin.com

Bringing B2B SaaS to the product-led growth retention light.
Advising organizations to bring growth, product, marketing, and sales in line, scaling to move down or upmarket. I work in the operational details and not the hypothetical clouds with my clients.

I write about it all on www.leahtharin.com (Blog, Podcast, Guides, Rates to work with me)

SAFe is a metaphor for every process you ever encountered that was convoluted and overly complicated. Can we learn something from it?

I love that I can look at their self-hosted picture and immediately see why this is misery on a grand scale.

I would summarize the experience I have from implementing company-wide processes in a couple of learnings:

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1. Any process that is complicated (<- complicated, not complex) and involves more than one team's alignment is not manageable efficiently at scale

2. Dependencies should not be managed, you have to eliminate them → cross-functional teams, insourcing competencies, budget autonomy to some degree. This works best if the pains are visible.

3. Introducing roles and process names that don't reflect what people do is borderline silly. → Product Owners do not own anything. They "own" their backlogs and are stuck in their career to execute top-down requirements.

4. If an idea can't be explained simply, it will be misunderstood.

5. Convoluted processes create spots to hide for low performers.

6. Teams are comprised of people and individuals who become more efficient if we allow them to stay together for some time instead of treating them like pawns that get shifted around.
_____

We have to unship processes in our organization on a regular basis and only introduce a minimum where necessary. People have a very limited bandwidth aside from the work they do, and giving them the freedom to innovate and find solutions is part of a company's success.

- If I get superior clarity from a small team that does only a minimum of SCRUM, what's the problem?

- If a team enjoys defining their tickets to an extensive amount before they work on them, why not let them?

Look, I get it. Our natural response to chaos and unpredictability is to introduce more control over processes. But talking on a regular to your teams and treating them as a collection of individuals helps.

It's time-consuming, but I take that any day over implementing an external monster like THAT. I experienced it when it was deployed twice. Every time I felt suffocated immediately and so did my teams.

Stop scotch-taping rigid organizations with processes.
Build a scaleable collaborative organization, a team of teams.

Full article:
https://lnkd.in/e5Frscq2

#agile #organizationalculture #management
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This article is brought to you by Paragon
29% of B2B SaaS companies use an embedded iPaaS to scale their products’ integration strategies - are you? If not, read this Build vs. Buy Guide before you build your next integration: https://lnkd.in/ehcEEnFN
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Leah Tharin

The customer will need it any minute! SHIP IT!

When your marketing is only good at memes.

This meme is a collaboration with the meme queen.

#marketingmeme

"OMG! Look what our competition did! We have to do the same!", CEO 🤡 <- The entire business case for a six-month project that landed in your product backlog.

I call this a company impostor syndrome. This is the proverbial blind leading the blind and overestimating how competent your competition is.

Leaders are constantly overestimating how much the bigger competitor has their stuff under control and therefore copy their crap blindly.

Even if your competitor had a good reason (they didn't) to change things around, it might only work for them and not for you since you have different customers, different tech, and different markets.

This funny exercise usually materializes in your roadmap. Plans no one understands and people telling you, "We are doing it because X does it" or "We promised it to the CEO to treat his chronic FOMO."

This is just one of seven fails I try to avoid when we talk about roadmapping. 
Free article here on all seven:

https://lnkd.in/eMk9957K
- Too much detail on effort estimations
- Too much focus on today
- Too much focus on the competition
- Too much focus on outputs
- Too public
- Not actionable enough
- Not properly communicated

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This post has kindly been sponsored by Paragon (https://lnkd.in/eMwCB58S) embedded iPaaS for developers
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Not showing your excitement could cost you a gig, like me.

This happened to me when I was new to advising and before that in some job applications. I had this "idea" on how to present myself and be "professional." because "now I'm a super important advisor, I have to behave accordingly".

You should never forget one thing in tech: You work with people. You work with entrepreneurs who have poured their heart and soul into their companies and probably were almost bankrupt many times to get to the point where they can even entertain a conversation with you and pay you a salary.

This is not about being overly joyful when it's just a job. It's not about faking emotions, but if you are excited about a product and company or challenge, show it.
Don't hide it because you think it's professional not to show emotions.

I have this particular experience when I get applications from FAANG product managers. They are hiding behind this overly professional, diplomatic facade. Yeah, you have a great CV. Outcome-driven, great experience. But I don't understand who you "are".

Don't tell me, "I feel like your product needs a little bit of an improvement in retention metrics," when you really think, "Oh my lord, I almost puked when I saw that interface and onboarded myself; we need to do something pronto about it, and I would love to be the person to help with that!"

I lost myself a lot of money when I heard from a potential client, "The other candidate felt like they are more excited about our problem space, sorry we went with them." After I aced the case study and everything... and I *was* excited, I was just holding myself back... because... professional?

That hurt. A lot. Don't let that happen to you.

Nowadays, I understand the founder's perspective: they don't need someone who is overly excited, but the people need to feel "something" about their product and how to change it.

You want to be taken for who you are, not who you can play.

50'000 on Linkedin. How do you Growth and Product Solopreneur? Great question. Let me answer them thoroughly in a free 5'000 word essay.

This time I answer questions from you all:
- What are the major differences between your role as a PM vs an independent PM Consultant?
- Which stage of projects do you select - idea stage, execution stage, maintenance stage?
- How do you grow and maintain a good flow of projects after your first client?
- Why do people hire a fractional PM?
- Once the problem to be solved is established, how do we ask for the right types of analytics and other resources?
- Can you provide examples of what an output might look like?
- Longevity - Do you feel that creating your firm has benefits in protecting against ageism in tech? Women and ageism in tech? Women in tech? Etc.
- How do I know whether I’m good enough to do this? I have an impostor syndrome.
- How realistic is it really to build a career as a solopreneur in 2024?

You all rock, thank you sharing and spreading the word and allowing me to pretend that I have free time on the Italian coast when I'm in fact working way too much :D

💪🙏🚀😃

Check it here:
https://lnkd.in/e7gxqzjX

It's really easy to experiment with your positioning if you are practical about it:

Whether you do it on a dedicated use case landing page or straight up on your Homepage, it's not always about getting millions of views to validate your positioning experiment. Especially in B2B you will have to make a lot of risky, low-data decisions:

First, have a prototype of your homepage or landing page ready and throw it in the face of people who are close to your ICP and suddenly take it away from them (without telling them initially what this is about). Then ask them to explain back to you what that company was about.

The things they remember not only test your positioning statements but also whether the message lands next to the smiling face of your CEO or Stock photography you're using.

Then, stick to a new positioning for a couple of months (the more upmarket you are, the longer) to see whether your pipeline starts to change. It takes time to activate, but it always starts with whatever your prospects see first.
That's not always the homepage; more often than not, it might be a use-case page they landed on if you have it.

I had a fantastic, actionable one-hour conversation with Anthony Pierri 🎸on the topic of B2B Homepage positioning, and it's out now on the ProducTea.

#productledgrowth

Hey Leah, what did you do last Week? Oh, nothing much. I told people about Gary, the Sales-led Growth villain.

I went to Malmö (SaaSiest) on Monday and Paris on Wednesday (Productique) to establish Gary, the sales guy, as the new vilified Persona in tech on everything that's wrong about classical Sales-led Growth and why its days are numbered in a competitive space where companies wake up to empowering their sales with product data to qualify and generate leads better.

They are less annoying, more efficient, and have a better product to sell than Gary.

And I had a lot of fun spreading the Gospel, thank you Daniel Nackovski, Thomas Sjöberg, for having me and all the friends that I finally met for the first time in person. 💪

When I received the pictures from the photographers and saw this one... I mean... common, your Photographer deserves a raise.

The full recording will be shared "soon," mostly new material, so I'm extremely relieved that it landed so well with people, and even though it may not appear that way until you hear the kind words from people, it's a nerve-wracking experience.

Thank you, Malmö. Thank you to everyone at SaaSiest and to everyone who made all of us speakers feel so welcome.
And thank you: Gary, for being such an insufferable meme; you make it so easy to have a presentation about you.

#productledgrowth #productledsales

Five PM & Growth Skills that I think you really shouldn't skip on in 2024.

- Summarization
- Managing up
- Understanding Marketing & Sales
- Don’t get high on your supply. Question your basics
- Run your team with outcomes, not agile processes

Specifically, when we talk about Summarization skills... this is what gets me. So many people suck at summarizing their really good ideas and thoughts.

You assume that people understand and didn't make an effort to properly summarize whatever artifact you are about to present or send around.

Especially nowadays, where everyone wants your attention on a plethora of different topics every day, you have to play the game as well and assume that whoever is listening to you already has been in 10 meetings that day with different contexts.

Make it easy on people. Simple, concise summaries are *chefs kiss*  for any leader and you will be loved for it.

Full Article:

www.leahtharin.com • 8 min read

Five non obvious skills for product & growth managers in 2024

Gary is part of the reason why we can't have nice things in Product-led Growth.  He "circles back" and pushes for a sale too hard, too early. Why this doesn't work when you try to build with an organic pipeline and how to solve it as a product person:

I've been busy creating completely new material around product-led growth and the misalignment between product, marketing, and sales that has been going on for years:

- What and how to align sales with your product as soon as you have revenue
- How to build long-term organic demand from the ground up and how to measure its success in 2024
- Why product struggles so much to tie anything to revenue, and how to solve it

I'll talk about it on the 17th of April, 18:30 - 20:30 CET in the first edition of Productique, and you can listen in remotely or in person in Paris; please help me spread the message against the Gospel of Gary and register:

https://shorturl.at/bfjmQ

I'm joined by Armand Thiberge, founder of Sendinblue (is now Brevo), a 100m ARR+ CRM giant. Our panel is moderated by Itxaso del Palacio, PhD 🚀

Productique is an event series where I'm in different European cities accompanied by another speaker and go in-depth on growth topics. Please help me make it successful by spreading the word, it's a dear topic to me to bring PLG operators together. Feel free to tag your friends in Paris that want to see me live complaining about Gary.

This is a collaboration between ProducTea with Leah, Paddle and Notion Capital 🙏

Hosted by Hexa

#productledgrowth

There is a big danger of trying to squeeze every last dollar out of product-led growth products. Your product and audience keep becoming better because you *don't* piss them off constantly. And negative word of mouth is a thing.

It's like exercising. Yes, you can add protein powder, keratin, and all other fancy stuff to your training regimen to optimize your performance.

But, if you don't show up to exercise in the first place to become better, it's all for absolutely nothing. And adding too much crap and making the experience complicated may actually lead to you stopping to exercise even if it's affordable.

It's the same with our customers and free users. Instead of constantly taking away stuff and squeezing a dollar here and there, keep it simple:

You stay ahead by delighting your customers constantly and monetizing more leniently.

I know; I'm getting tired of hearing it, too, because it sounds lofty. But there are two types of initiatives to drive your revenue:

- Optimization of the things that work but don't add value. (Pricing experiments, packaging, taking away stuff)

- Innovation and polishing of the product and the value that your users get continuously from you. Whether that's free or paid.

Don't focus only on the first and forget the second. The hangover will be painful, and you won't be the first brand to fall from grace.

The big money is in big value that keeps on giving.

Great episode with Adam Robinson

Full episode is out now on Spotify, Youtube and my Substack: 

https://lnkd.in/eRuihJ8F

#productledgrowth

What exactly is the problem if your product people suck at putting numbers to their roadmap?

I've been in countless meetings where PMs talk about "huge impact", "it's very important to our customers" or "If we don't fix this that's bad practice" when discussions are going around on what should be built on their roadmap.

This is usually pitted against arguments from the CFO and CRO that go something like this:

- CFO: "If we don't fix this particular issue, we run into a compliance risk of 500,000$ this year."
- CRO: "We have this one big client that needs feature x that nets us a 1,2 million account. It's not even a big thing to do. Can you fit it in?"

If the product organization is entering these discussions with "huge impact" and "bad practice," what do you think is happening? The problem is that as a PM, your business cases need to be much more airtight than what Sales is doing because they are paid to be convincing. And they will use these skills "against" you to get what they want.

Your antidote is how much C-Level trusts your case:
- Good past performance of your hypothesis
- Overall Impact and validation that is easy to read (greed sells)
- Realistic casing and eventuality scenarios
- Past visibility in Sales requesting something that no one uses

Sales represent one customer at a time until they sign, whereas your team represents all users of your segment until they churn.

You *need* to speak the same language as the rest of the company.  A day invested into a solid business case is a month worth of having less discussions and stable backlogs.

You really should be the most knowledgeable person in the room about your product area when it comes to the numbers, no one else.

Full Article:
https://lnkd.in/eZwbMa7A

#productledgrowth
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This article is kindly sponsored by Paragon:

Still backlogging your users’ integration requests? Save 70% of the engineering with Paragon’s embedded iPaaS.
https://lnkd.in/eMwCB58S
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Launching a new Newsletter or asset as a startup... how do I get people to pay attention to this at all? The time of "If it's great, people will notice it, is over."

How should you start? Paid ads? Or dump it into production quality? Should you invest more first and then less?

Casey is specific about it: invest in the quality of your content from the get-go. It is not necessarily how it "looks" but how good the value of your advice is; then, try to keep that up for a couple of months so you can check your leading metrics to see whether this is worth investing in in the long term.

This has also been my experience when building out my own newsletter/podcast. Predicting performance is very hard if you constantly change the production value and other variables.

The more consistent you are, the more predictable the story becomes for the long term once you have months of data.

We're talking about this and many more topics in the 2nd episode of the ProducTea Season 4.

Casey Hill is one of those people that I invite to the podcast because they keep dropping actionable advice that actually works, and he unpacked a ton of Email channel wisdom for B2B.

Full episode: https://lnkd.in/eQRYEdPd

When I'm supposed to present a business case to the board, but I didn't read it, and it's not mine.

24 hours remaining! Meet us remotely or in Paris for a 45-minute panel at 19:00 CET / 10:00 am PT sharp for the first Productique with Leah! (That's Me!)

Armand Thiberge and I will talk about healthy PLG and Product-led Sales unit economics and all the nice problems that come with that.
Moderated by the fabulous Itxaso del Palacio, PhD.

Register here; very few spots remain! https://lnkd.in/gNCQZZMZ

Thanks to our amazing partners, I get to do this many times all over Europe.

Thank you, Amazon Web Services (AWS), notably Leon Rees, Patricia Suhrcke, Cédric Olivier Tzeuton, the Paddle and Amplitude  team, for being awesome.

#productledgrowth

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