Product Bandit
In a high-growth company, nothing matters more than impact - finding product-market fit, driving engagement and retention, creating more value for your customers and your business.
With more than a decade building products and teams in high-growth startups at all stages, we've seen what success and failure look like, and learned from both.
Jump over those hard lessons to accelerate growth for your company, team, or career with Product Bandit.
Founders are, by definition, a company's first product leaders. But many founders lack experience in product management, and find themselves learning things the hard way more often than not. These founders may have investors, advisors, or former colleagues who have a product background, but they often lack the bandwidth and detailed context to really help the founders navigate these challenges.
At Product Bandit, we partner with non-product founders to enable them to rapidly become effective product leaders without having to get there the hard way. We help identify the most valuable gaps to fill, and provide guidance, frameworks, and hands-on support, from big picture product vision and strategy to tactical details around product delivery, working effectively with design and engineering, and more.
Product strategy is challenging for even the most seasoned product leaders. Few considerations are more complex and high-stakes for a startup. Founders have to balance the need for conviction and commitment to a strategy, with the reality of constant change and learning that can cause constant questioning of whether they've gotten it all wrong. As the team and company grow, this becomes more and more complicated and communication and alignment become even more challenging.
In our product strategy consulting engagements, we partner closely with founders to:
- Evaluate their existing de-facto product strategy (not just what's on paper)
- Diagnose the biggest challenges preventing it from achieving expected business outcomes
- Define an updated strategy that the founders are willing to bet on, and which addresses those challenges
- Build alignment among company leadership to bring that strategy to life through their teams
Startups have a variety of product leadership needs that they can't, or shouldn't, solve through hiring FTEs. In the early stages, funding is tight but finding product-market fit is existentially urgent, and hiring a full time product exec isn't financially feasible. When it does come time to hire a product leader, it can take months to find the right person, and it's not an option to spin wheels in the meantime. Or you've hired a world-class product leader who is going on parental leave for two months, and the show must go on while they're away.
Fractional or interim product leadership is a great solution in any of these situations. We can structure an engagement that is tailor-made for your organization, budget, and needs, and help you accelerate through these challenges without losing any momentum.
Later on, there comes a point when the founders need to hire their first PM or product leader. This comes with its own set of challenges for both the founders and the new product leader. This can easily devolve into a power struggle that frustrates everyone involved and grinds progress and momentum to a halt.
In many cases, a company's first non-founder product leader will be taking on their first organizational leadership role, having worked as a PM or Group PM for several years. This transition from IC to management, and/or from managing a small team within a larger organization to leading product for an entire company, can be extremely challenging, and often requires un-learning many of the habits that made them successful in previous roles with smaller scope.
At Product Bandit, we've been the first product leader at multiple startups, and worked with numerous founders struggling to find, hire, onboard, and work effectively with new PMs or product leaders. We've also helped several first-time product leaders navigate the new challenges they face, having been in those shoes ourselves and learned many hard lessons through trial and error. We offer these leaders support that founders can't provide themselves, whether due to bandwidth constraints, lack of product experience, or the need for an external perspective.
We thrive on helping each client to unlock growth and impact, and we don't settle for anything less. This starts with identifying the dimensions of growth that matter most to each client, and helping them identify and overcome the challenges standing in their way.
Building a great product can only happen through deep empathy with the people who will use it. The same principle applies to our work. In each engagement, we establish strong rapport and empathy with our clients, their teams, and their customers.
We also help our clients to develop skills and programs that deepen their empathy towards their customers and colleagues, and unlock insights and opportunities for impact.
In a fast-paced organization, it's too easy to lose time and opportunity when team members don't or can't communicate clearly and directly across all levels. Leaders need to both practice and actively welcome candor amongst their teams, and we strive to practice that with each of our clients.
Similarly, time and opportunity also get lost when communication isn't constructive and empathetic. When leaders model this, and hold their teams accountable to it, they build credibility and trust with their teams, empower each team member to fully unleash their creativity, intellect, and potential to make impact.
