Tanguy Crusson has spent 10+ years at Atlassian, where he's taken several products from zero to one, including HipChat, Statuspage, and most recently, Jira Product Discovery. In this episode, we dive deep into the struggles and lessons of innovating and building new products inside a large company. Tanguy shares candid stories about what's worked, what hasn't, and everything he's learned about successfully building 0 to 1.
We cover:
🔸 Why large companies with so many advantages still fail at creating new products
🔸 How to avoid common pitfalls like competitive myopia and premature scaling
🔸 Lessons learned from acquisitions
🔸 Lessons from competing with Slack
🔸 Insights from the success of Jira Product Discovery
🔸 Tactics for protecting your “ugly babies”
🔸 The power of “lighthouse users”
🔸 The importance of having a “why now”
🔸 So much more
Listen now 👇
- YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gr9f4D45
- Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gmiuz944
- Apple: https://lnkd.in/gWGAc5ZX
Some key takeaways:
1. “Don’t eat your own bullshit.” When launching new products within companies that have already seen some success, it’s easy to assume that your existing playbooks will work again. But what got you here won’t take you there. You need to define, test, and validate your assumptions, because they may very well be wrong—especially when targeting new customer segments.
2. Startups benefit from starving. Starving creates hunger, which drives people to solve problems with resourcefulness and urgency. When exploring new products in a big company with excessive resources, you need to create scarcity to emulate this startup starvation. This generally means operating as a small, scrappy, siloed team.
3. The most likely outcome when launching a new product is failure—even at big companies that appear to have many advantages. It’s important to ground new product launches in this reality so that you can deter the company from over-investing, which ultimately serves to reduce hunger, slow things down, and decrease the chances of success. After all, why invest heavily in something that’s most likely to fail anyway?
4. Success for new products should be measured differently from existing ones, both in terms of metrics and time horizons. In general, new products should be judged by whether the team is answering the right questions at the right pace and whether the team is still excited about the new bet’s potential. It’s a common mistake to judge new products by metrics that a big company is used to, like MAUs or revenue. However, if a team is optimizing for MAUs or revenue before they’ve worked to understand the problem, they will be working on the wrong things.
5. Atlassian uses a four-phase approach to launching new products and deciding whether to invest in them further: Wonder, Explore, Make, Impact
Investor| Ex-VP @ Coinbase, Ex-Airbnb, Instagram, Facebook, Microsoft
1wSuper excited to join the TEAM! And look forward to working with you, Anu!!