How to Create Focus for a Startup: Real-World Examples from Literator
In the last 12 months, Literator has grown a lot — we started our first cohort of paid pilots and have grown to 4,000+ schools world-wide. Over dozens of releases on multiple platforms and hundreds of customer conversations later, we’ve learned a lot about how to grow while staying focused.
The internet is full of advice and frameworks, but not many real-world examples, so I’d like to share 3 artifacts that we use at Literator: company values, value props, and product focus guidelines.
These examples are most useful for people on a small team that’s already shipped an MVP and fixed the low-hanging fruits (if you are pre-product, this other article I wrote will be more helpful).
If you feel like your product just isn’t “leveling up” despite everyone working hard, then frameworks like the ones shown below can help you discover where the problem is.
Company Values
Defining your company’s core values is important for a variety of reasons. This article does a great job of going into the what, why, and how… so I’ll fast foward to showing you Literator’s core values:
We share this document with every employee and contractor. We have it pinned up in the office. It’s helped us come to a consensus faster on many decisions , such as:
- Have you ever had a terrible day but you had to put on a brave face for some really important meeting? At Literator, when someone asks “I’m not in a good place today, can we do this tomorrow?” We always say “Yes.” — no judgement — because we’d rather you take care of yourself, and come back when you can perform your best. — Our value of sustainable culture.
- We sent a December newsletter about self care because we knew it was a really hard month for teachers, even if the content had anything to do with Literator. — Our value of teachers first.
- We discussed shuttering the free product so we can focus on our paid product, but decided against it because we are committed to making a difference, even if it’s a very small difference, for teachers and schools that can’t afford it. — Our value of committed to equity.
Every company is different and there are no right or wrong values. Some of the decisions that were right for our company can be completely wrong for a company that holds different values. This is simply an example of what values can look like and how they can be used to make decisions.
Value Props
After our first few releases, we fell into what I can only describe as “running in quicksand”: our team had to re-align on value props for every major release (which took hours), feature requests all seemed equally critical, and we were using business/product/value/lean canvases but we iterated so fast that we need to completely revamp them every release.
I desperately needed a one-glance visual that can be my team’s starting guide for every discussion. Like setting an intention for a meditation session. The answer to our problem is this pyramid:
This was the result of digging back through 3 years of user feedback, cross-checking it with our 5-year and 10-year visions, and validating with the rest of the company. We used the shape of Maslow’s hierarchy because it represented the relationship between Literator’s value props.
We use this visual for every strategy and tactics meeting — it helped aligned our sales, support, design and engineering efforts over multiple releases. It gave us a clearer way to think of our priorities, and allowed us to refer back to a common vocabulary. The result was intangible but clear — our meetings were shorter and had clearer conclusions because there was less arguing and we came to a consensus faster.
Product Focus Guidelines
The product team uses the guidelines to decide on granular tradeoffs during planning, design, and the inevitable cutting-tasks-to-ship-on-time phase.
For brevity, I’ll focus on 2 examples in our guideline:
1. The only opinion that matters is one that follows up with money
A startup’s core market is people who are already willing to pay you — really kill their problems and find more people like them. We follow this formula:
current customer > churned customer > current free user > churned free user
When we had to decide between the ability to “import custom skill packs” (request of current customers) or fixing the “onboarding experience” (feedback from churned customers), we decided to do the former since it is feedback from current customers. As a result, we had better retention and more schools interested in purchasing us because of this new feature.
3. Focus on the value props
In our Product Value Props visual, the bottom of the pyramid must be “stable” — don’t design features for the higher levels if they weaken the foundation. (Just like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs)
Also, MVP is not neccessarily just 1 feature. MVP solves 1 problem, even if it involves multiple features, to provide reward > effort.
When we were planning for the release of Student Groups on mobile, we didn’t have the resources to ship the full feature set, which included: displaying a list of skills (#1), rating each skill (#2), taking free-hand notes (#3), on both Android and iOS (#4).
Using the above guideline, we knew that delivering the value prop “everything in 1 place” was more important than platform parity, and we knew that free-hand notes satisfy more data-entry situations than rating skills, so we decided to ship displaying a list of skills (#1) and taking free-hand notes (#3) on only iOS.
With this tighter scope, we were able to ship a quality release of Student Groups instead of scrambling to finish on time, and these features immediately provided teachers with a complete solution to their problem.
Your mileage may vary
These 3 artifacts — Company values, Value props, and Product focus guidelines— are not one-size-fits-all. We’re a small team, newcomers to the market, and everyone works on every product. I have no idea if it’ll work for large teams, products that have saturated the market, or teams that are more silo’d.
I only briefly touched on each topic, but I hope this was helpful. Would you like to read a full article on Company values, Value props, or Product focus guidelines? Or have you done similar things with bigger teams or more mature products? Let me know in the comments!
