Park Place or Parked Place?

Ah Monopoly... one of my favorite board games that, little did I know at the time, exposed me to basic business concepts years earlier than any schooling!

If you owned Park Place or Boardwalk (or both!!) you knew you had a path to grow.

Nearly every time I've met with a Founder or CEO of a Growth Stage company, the conversation goes to some form of the same question: "We need to figure out why we aren't hitting our growth targets... ASAP."

Then s/he digs deeper:

• "We have paying customers who like our tech and our team..."

• "We have a sales team who is solid..."

• "Our engineering team is strong, the customers like what they build..."

• "We feel good about how we stack up against our competitors but we know we should be grabbing more market share from them..."

• "How do we know that we are building the right product for the right market? If we were then we should be able to meet or exceed our growth targets..."

So what's being overlooked? In my experience, when a Growth Stage company isn't growing, it's always in large part due to a lack of appropriate Product Management.

As a product management leader and evangelist, I fully admit I'm biased. I'm not implying that there are never problems in GTM teams or approach, pricing, external headwinds, etc., What I am saying is that a Product company has to first and foremost do Product Management well before any other function can be successful and yet, it is rarely properly prioritized, funded, led, or supported.

The best advice I can give a Founder or CEO is to make sure you have a Product leader who can priortize not just an enhancement backlog but knows their craft well enough to know which key Product Management activities aren't being done (to the detriment of your growth potential). If you don't have that leader and can't yet afford to hire one, look for other forms of outside expertise to help you map a course to growth.