Published on <a href="http://ift.tt/2s6HbCp">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> TheRobHayes <img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2tc5XRJ">Thanks SadSayings.com ( 🤔 not a very uplifting URL)
<h3>Congratulations founder!</h3>
You just found your product-market fit and raised capital! These are massive milestones for your company and validation that the business you’re building has the potential for serious growth. All your months and years of grinding on your idea are paying off!
Guess what? Everything you need to focus on is about to change. So that means you need to fundamentally change the way you build your product too.
<h3>How you used to build your product</h3>
Prior to raising capital, your team has been small, close-knit and operated heads-down with a focus on proving out your value proposition. You have spent your time with your sleeves rolled up, working hands-on building product and guiding it’s vision.
You spent your days sitting in the same room, so your vision for the product was constantly being discussed and was understood by all on your team. At this stage, your vision is often focused enough that everybody knows what they need to code, design, market, sell, etc. to deliver on it.
<h3>Switching your focus towards your next round</h3>
Working with other founders who have arrived at this stage in their business, this is the moment where all of that changes. There is a consistent pattern in what changes your focus:
New Responsibilities — functions that previously weren’t part of the business become fundamental to your reaching your next round. Shaping culture, driving growth and hiring become your priorities, and you won’t find many free minutes in your day to focus on anything else.
Narrowing Focus — previously you acted as a jack-of-all-trades, doing a bit of everything to build a viable product. With funding, your role takes on a singular focus, so you need to specialize in solving the single, largest problem that threatens your team at any given time. CEOs, you’re now focused on driving growth. CTO’s, you’re managing a growing technical team.
Establishing Process — for each problem you focus on, you’ll only want to solve it once. Your job is to establish a scalable processes for each these that allow you to hand off ownership to someone else, because your company will won’t grow if you’re involved in managing everything.
Growing Scope — with more team members, more features, more customers and more bugs, you’ve got a dozens of cooks in the product kitchen. The to-do list for your product will grow rapidly, and if that isn’t actively managed it’s going to cause frustration and chaos for your team, leaving them feeling directionless (which is terrible — avoid this.)
Ok, you get the picture — things need to change. How?
<h3>Three steps to manage a scaling product</h3>
Practically speaking, there are three things that you can do to manage your product as you scale — create an organized product strategy, institute regular communication around your product development, and delegate ownership of the product to someone else.
1. Build your product framework — a product framework is a simple way to break down your product from a high-level idea into the day-to-day activities your team will work on.
<blockquote>Product Vision -&gt; Product Strategies -&gt; Product Roadmap -&gt; Tasks/Stories</blockquote>
Creating this type of structure keeps everyone on your team working in the same direction, with a clear idea of how each task they work on is contributing to your company delivering on the product vision.
2. Introduce a product management process — the purpose of a good PM process is one thing — communication. Putting this process in place ensures that you’re regularly asking what each team and the customers need from the product, determining priority of those requests, and communicating those priorities with the team.
At it’s most basic level, a good PM process forces everybody on your team to talk and share their product needs on a regular basis. This will ensure that everyone on your team knows what is being worked on and why.
3. Hand off product management — It is hard to remove yourself from the development of your product because you have spent so much time developing the vision for it and working with your team to execute on it. But, it is necessary to step back from the day-to-day management of your product so you can focus on other parts of your growing business.
Spreading your attention between hiring a team, driving growth and actively managing your product means you’re going to do a bad job at everything. Having someone focusing their time on managing the product framework and process gives your team a regular resource day-in, day-out as they plan, build and ship.
<h3>How you lead product moving forward</h3>
Don’t worry though, you don’t need to say goodbye permanently — you just need to focus your attention on where you can provide the most value. As founder, it will forever be your job to define and communicate your product vision to the team. This is the <a href="http://ift.tt/2gE4uKJ">greatest point of leverage</a> you can have over the product that gets built.
<blockquote>Own the vision, institute a framework and a process, then hand it off.</blockquote>
If you are able to define for your team what your product is, they will figure out how to build it. This will enable you to focus on other aspects of your business that so dearly need your time and attention, and will allow your team to continue to do what it does best — build and ship great products.
Want to comment/argue/discuss? I’m on <a href="http://twitter.com/therobhayes">@therobhayes</a>
Thanks to <a href="http://ift.tt/2tby9E9">Bryn Jones</a> for guidance on this 👍
<img src="http://ift.tt/2tL3Cdg" width="1" height="1" alt="stat?event=post.clientViewed&amp;referrerSou">
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<a href="http://ift.tt/2tc2UsD">If you love your product, you need to let it go</a> was originally published in <a href="http://ift.tt/2cAqCpx">prototypr</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you love your product, you need to let it go

Congratulations founder!

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