Thinking Like a VC: 5 Questions to Supercharge Your Product Ownership

Growing, launching, finding product-market fit. Much like VCs and start-up founders, product managers are often looking to enter new territory, test hypotheses and validate ideas

Regardless of where you’re at in the product development lifecycle, staying attuned to progress is key. Using a series of questions, VCs and start-up accelerators help founders maintain momentum and accountability through regular progress check-ins. 

This methodology doesn’t have to be confined to start-ups. Product managers are the glue that bind the many functions that touch a product—engineering, design, operations, marketing, customer success, sales, finance, legal, and more. In this article, we’ll explore the questions asked of start-up founders and how they can be used to also maximise results in your role.

1. How many weeks until launch?

The first thing on a VCs mind is when the product is getting out so they can start to see returns on their investment and founders will have an understanding of key milestones and timelines to feed back. In terms of how this relates to product managers—this one’s a bit of a no brainer! This directly translates into an understanding of the stage of product development. 

Chances are you’re already asking yourself this question on a regular basis, but it can be easy to fall into the trap of day-to-day firefighting without taking a moment to zoom out. It’s important to take a step back to assess progress so that you can effectively prioritise tasks, allocate resources, and mitigate risks.

Try to think like a VC and look beyond your remit to the significance of a launch in achieving strategic objectives. This is particularly important if you’re early-on in your career and looking to demonstrate your ability to understand how your pillar fits into the broader business goals.

2. How many customers did you talk to last week & what did you learn from them?

VCs want their portfolio companies to demonstrate their commitment to understanding customer needs, validating product market fit, and using real feedback to iterate. It’s been proven that companies that centre the user in their decisions have an increased likelihood of long-term success and growth. This question underscores the importance of customer feedback in informing product decisions and driving improvements. 

These interviews can be mentally taxing and difficult to stay on top of, but you should be doing this frequently to validate hypotheses and gather insights on needs and pain points. Particularly in the early stages of feature development. Reflecting on your answers regularly can highlight bottlenecks and opportunities to optimise your interview-to-iteration pipeline.

3. On a scale of 1-10, what is your morale?

It’s important to VCs that morale in their portfolio companies is high. Particularly amongst founders, who steer the ship. It promotes productivity and employee retention—all of which increase the chance of long-term success. 

However, morale can vary greatly between squads as you filter down from the executive team. Product managers should always have their finger on the pulse when it comes to assessing motivation in their teams. A happy team feels heard, trusted, and respected, and given our multidisciplinary role, we’re in the best position to facilitate that.

Proactively check in with your team and yourself to assess morale (retros are a good opportunity for this). If it’s high, gather feedback on what’s going well and share your learnings with other squads. If it’s low, try to dig down to the root cause. Common reasons might be a lack of clarity on goals or expectations, or a lack of psychological safety. Putting your ego aside and doing this regularly prevents things going off track.

4. What has most improved your primary metric?

By understanding which specific changes or actions have had the most significant impact on a company’s primary metrics, the VC can assess several things. Is this company demonstrating an ability to concentrate their efforts and hone in on one primary metric that moves the needle, rather than spreading themselves too thin? Are they refining their approach based on empirical evidence rather than intuition alone? Is there a commitment to transparency and accountability?

It’s important to ensure everyone is on the same page about this metric. VCs, particularly during early funding rounds, can have a laser focus on growth over profitability. This isn’t to say they want high burn rates, but they’ll never fund slow growth. So depending on the maturity of your company, the chosen metric will need to strike the right balance of innovation and optimisation.

It's a question that highlights the importance of focus, data-driven decision-making, and accountability in product management, and something that every product manager should be prepared to answer. We should focus on metrics closely tied to product success and understand what initiatives positively impact them so that we can replicate successful strategies.

5. What is your biggest challenge right now?

All companies, particularly start-ups, face challenges in their path to growth. Rather than looking for a lack of risks or challenges, VCs want reassurance that founders are able to identify and address them proactively.

In a project, product managers face various hurdles, whether technical constraints, operational inefficiencies, or market uncertainties. You can also be responsible for resolving obstacles faced by your team, like helping the design team refine their outputs to unblock the developers. Taking the time to reflect on these can help you implement initiatives that resolve these proactively rather than reactively to maintain velocity. 

This question highlights the interconnectedness of product management and company-wide objectives and the part we play in driving business growth and innovation. By engaging in dialogue about the company's challenges, we can leverage our expertise and insights to support founders in developing strategic solutions to these obstacles through risk mitigation and resource allocation.

The Takeaway

Much like founders, product managers are often looking to enter new territory, test hypotheses and validate ideas. By regularly considering these questions, we’re equipped to answer the most difficult stakeholder questions that come our way.

We can also adopt a more holistic approach to our craft—frequently visiting elements of customer-centricity, goal-setting, and problem-solving, and leveraging the insights to navigate complexities and drive continuous improvement, much like the startup ecosystem.