Vickie Peng: Great product missions must be customer-centric and decade-focused
Vickie Peng · Vickie Peng: Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product? | E1141 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Apr 17, 2024 · at 17:53
Vickie Peng, Product Partner at Sequoia Capital, outlines her framework for defining product missions during an episode of 20VC.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Ok, so there's two core things I think that make a great product mission. One is that it's customer centric. So it should describe what it changes for the customer and their world, how it changes the customer's world. Two is that it is a thing that you can imagine working against or working towards For the next decade, not the next quarter.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Vickie Peng
Peng: Joining startups too early as a product leader creates founder friction
“The thing that I actually warn both founders and product operators against is joining as a product leader too early in a company. And what I mean by that is there's kind of three layers of product. There's product vision, there's product strategy, and there's …”
Peng: Linear succeeded by prioritizing engineers over product managers
“Most of these issue tracking tools go for PMs first. Right. It's like, you're the manager, you're the planner, you're planning the development, the roadmap, the cycle, all this kind of stuff. That's the target customer. And the fact that they kind of flipped t…”
Peng: Pre-PMF startups should track specific product actions instead of NPS
“So pre-product market fit, the strong advice to pick a number that represents customer happiness. And I recommend not using MPS. I recommend using a metric that's specifically an action in your product.”
Platforms can add performance marketing engines without diluting community magic
“You can preserve the magic of the community while also building a performance marketing engine and those two can coexist, and you don't have to Dilute the former to get the latter”