Season 2 of the ProducTea! I’m joined by a silicon valley legend: Dave Kellogg, EIR at Balderton Capital, independent consultant/advisor, and author of Kellblog.

We delve into the pitfalls of building a product strategy on shaky foundations and highlight anyone’s job of designing effective experiments to facilitate learning.

We speak about an inherent fear of executives missing out constantly and distinguishing between strategic and opportunistic revenue.

Why a company is not a democracy where every customer gets an equal say, and how to be cautious about the bad behaviors that can come from improper incentives.

We share insights on establishing control over finding successful customers in a sales-led growth company and the concept of product-led sales and territories.

Lastly, he addresses the challenges of understanding the inner workings of a SaaS company which usually means taking a hard look in the mirror.

Timestamps:

02:15 Dave’s introduction
07:18 Explaining Marketing / Sales to technical people
11:45 Not accepting things you don’t understand, conventional wisdom that’s not true
15:50 What do people get wrong about Dave?
17:35 Building product strategy on things that have no business to be built around & decision bias
22:40 Your job is to design a good experiment - did we learn or did we learn nothing?
25:17 A system that incentivizes to move metrics that are hard to manipulate → What is success?
34:10 C-level fear of missing out. Strategic revenue and opportunistic revenue
38:00 Your company is not a democracy where every customer gets one vote
40:40 Bad behavior driven by incentivizing people wrong.
47:15 Trying to get control over finding customers that will be successful in a sales-led growth company, product-led sales & territory
54:25 Why is it so difficult to understand what’s going on inside a SaaS company?

Connect!

Dave’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelloggdave/
Dave’s blog: https://kellblog.com/
Leah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahtharin/

Send us a text

Leah on Linkedin / Twitter / Youtube

Episode 284: Merry Christmas