https://firstround.com/review/to-build-great-products-build-this-strong-scalable-system-first/
Alex Le and Kavin Stewart have a fairly unusual “how we met” story. Today, the two are oddly (but aptly) co-VPs of Product at Reddit. But when they first encountered each other eight years ago, they were founders of competing social gaming startups. Instead of going head to head, they ended up swapping advice they could both use to thrive — it turned out Le was more about design, and Stewart was focused on revenue and growth. The yin to the other’s yang, they kept in touch when they moved into executive product roles at other companies, and now, finally, get to work together to solve problems for arguably the most robust, vocal, and diverse community on the internet.
Co-VPs might sound like a bad idea as soon as you hear it. Certainly, a lot has been written about the perils of Co-CEOs. But it works for Stewart and Le, largely for one reason: they share extensive experience building products at every single stage of company life. They’ve both seen a lot succeed and a lot go south. They’ve both witnessed how product pipelines need to grow and break and change, and they’re all too familiar with the mistakes that ruin products and damage process along the way.
In this exclusive interview, they focus on the radical shift from product market-fit into growth — a change that steamrolls far too many promising startups. With the tactics they recommend, companies at every phase can learn how to create effective, replicable and (perhaps most importantly) durable product development systems.
There is such a thing as startup puberty. And it happens right when your product starts to gain traction. Much like puberty, this change often catches people off guard. Sure, they anticipated it would happen, but that doesn’t mean they were ready — they were too busy working to get there.
For product, the most important changes are:
With these new needs, you need more people. This is when things get complicated, says Stewart. In order to set people up for success, you need to make your product and engineering teams modular. That way, you can split up problems and hand out discrete work that people can run with independently. This is what gives you real leverage as you grow — having many teams, mostly autonomously led — all sprinting side by side. Starting this modular approach early bakes it into your culture and allows you to scale much more easily later.
“You have to understand very specifically where you are in your company’s lifespan, and apply the right process at the right time,” says Stewart. “And ideally, you build a process that you can tweak as you grow, rather than tearing it down and rebuilding it every time you hit a new stage.”
Even though Reddit is an older company, it still runs into these same transitions. A prime example: Recently, the company has been building out its mobile apps. Initial ideas for what they should look and feel like came from the team, because they’re all regular redditors themselves.
“We had enough empathy with core users to get the first app out and in the store and have it be successful initially,” says Le. “But we know we’re going to run into the unknown as we start onboarding users who are either new to Reddit or who see the world differently from us.”
We never let ourselves forget: What got us here won't get us there.
To figure out the next set of mobile app features, they’ll need to do their homework and endure the same growing pains as an earlier-stage startup. “We can’t just field community requests and hand them out to PMs and engineers for them to address anymore,” says Stewart. “Instead, we need teams that don’t just build features on assignment, but actually investigate what problems we’re not hearing about, and think through what features might solve them. I see a lot of younger startups hit this point around Series A.”
The process they’ve put in place is called Hypothesis-Driven Product Management. Its central thesis is this: It’s no longer good enough for a PM to say, “I think users want this feature.” Instead, you need to ask, “What outcome do you predict this feature will have?”
Pre-Series A you don’t really have the data you need to do this, says Le. “At the seed stage, your company in itself is your hypothesis. You present it to the world to see if it will work. As you start to grow, this branches into more hypotheses about which direction the company should go in, and that branches into even more hypotheses about individual features, and on and on.” Your ability to make educated guesses becomes the stem cell and fuel for making your product better for more people.
In Stewart and Le’s estimation, three major areas of product development change as a company matures: How you generate ideas, how you execute those ideas, and how you iterate on those ideas. Below, they share the best ways they’ve seen startups make these leaps.