The product lens

Chris Dixon, on the balance between product development and financing:

Good entrepreneurs spend most of their time focusing on the other market: the one between their company and their customers. This means looking at the world through the lens of products and not financing. This lens is particularly important when you are initially developing your idea or when you are thinking about product expansions.

The product lens suggests you should ask questions like: have the products in area X caught up to the best practices of the industry? Are they reaching their potential? Are they exciting? Are there big cultural/technological/economic changes happening that allow dramatically better products to be created?

The useful part of this framing is that it moves the question away from the company’s needs and back to the customer’s. Financing matters, obviously, but it is a poor lens for deciding what should exist. It can explain how a company survives. It cannot explain why anyone would care.

As a rule of thumb, companies that stop seeing through the product lens tend not to last long. The spreadsheet can describe the business. It cannot explain the product.

(Via Parislemon.)