I’m Paul Joyce, Founder and CEO of Geckoboard. AMA!

Hi @Logesh - thanks for your question, love it! This is something that I wish I had given greater consideration at the very start of the journey. Honestly, my product discipline wasn’t great back then and that caused hiccups for us

  1. In the early days, it was clear that we were on to something
  2. But understanding exactly which parts of the market we fit with best was very unclear
  3. This was because we didn’t segment feedback by… anything really! This is a pretty shocking admission and 100% down to my ignorance and lack of experience
  4. So, pretty obviously, this resulted in too many laboured product roadmap discussions and analysis paralysis
  5. Even worse, it also resulted in prioritising work that should never have been considered, a huge opportunity cost
  6. Thankfully, once we hired our first Product Manager, this got a lot better
  7. We started by segmenting by use case or company type
  8. It turns out that there were a lot more than we had anticipated
  9. This helped us to understand which parts of the market we were serving well and which would never be a good fit
  10. We set about concentrating on the markets we believed would be best served by our product and ditching the ones that weren’t
  11. It also helped us to be a lot clearer with our positioning and messaging, allowing prospects who were a bad fit to see that without evening signing up
  12. We later developed that by segmenting by Job to be Done
  13. This was a very powerful mechanism for discussing feedback and product roadmap planning
  14. It also helped us to identify adjacent markets that we could develop the product into
  15. In summary, we should indeed have narrowed our focus by properly segmenting our feedback from the very start
  16. Doing so, allowed us to discard whole swathes of the product roadmap freeing up more resources to make a better product and position it more clearly for the customers for whom we were a good fit
5 Likes