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Dear SaaStr: Where should a new head of product focus in their first 30 days? My strong advice is speak with data. And that may mean at first — not speaking too much! 🙂 Here’s my suggestion for the first 30 days: - Visit as many customers as you can. Try to visit at least 10 in person, and … - Talk to as many customers as you can. Zoom with another 10–20. - Listen in on as many sales calls as you can. Also listen to as many Choruses and Gongs as you can. - Listen in on as many customer success calls as you can. Hopefully, there are many!! - Answer 100 support tickets. Do at least 4–5 stints on support. Ideally, more. Trust me. Do it. - Start a weekly webinar for existing customers AND prospects — and listen. Ask for open-ended questions at the end. - Ask the sales team to force rank their Top 10 feature requests. - Ask the dev team to force rank their Top 10 pieces of technical debt. - Publish your product roadmap. This will force folks to align. Especially do not ignore point #1. Any product leader not visiting customers their first week is going to fail. They just want to manage processes. Or spend their days all in internal meetings, having their team go do it. No. You cannot ship great products without constantly, and immediately, talking to customers. And most importantly, don’t under hire for this role. I see this again and again. You want a real VP that knows how to align the troops, build and ship features, and speak with customers. Not a junior product person that can’t drive things to the next level. Visit and Listen. Catalog. Then Act. Then, and only then, provide real opinions on where the product should go. Once you have data to back those opinions up. Not just “Here’s How We Did It At My Last Company.” More here: The 1 Simple Test to Know if You’ve Actually Hired a Real VP of Product or Customer Success … Or Not (note: an updated SaaStr Classic answer)
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