In this 5‑Minute Friday video, Ibrahim Bashir shares a compressed, action‑oriented framework for new heads of product at B2B companies. He argues that the classic 90‑day onboarding plan is obsolete; a 30‑day plan is required to deliver high‑leverage impact quickly. Bashir introduces the concept of “insights per minute,” urging product leaders to constantly educate senior stakeholders with valuable, data‑driven observations. He stresses that success hinges on strong cross‑functional relationships with sales, customer success, marketing, and engineering, not just the CEO. Bashir then outlines six concrete focus areas for the first month: (1) audit the onboarding funnel for leaks, (2) accelerate the customer “aha” moment and time‑to‑value, (3) resolve go‑to‑market “paper‑cut” pain points, (4) study the most successful customers to replicate their usage patterns, (5) reaffirm the core job‑to‑be‑done and ensure its reliability, and (6) evaluate scalability, cost‑to‑serve, and profitability to align with finance. The video ends with a visual mnemonic for these priorities and a call to iterate quickly while building bridges across the organization.
Chapters
Hey folks, I'm back with another 5 Minute Friday and I'm going to try doing this on video for the first time. And if it resonates with folks, maybe I'll do that more often. But quick-hitting topic today. So I've been sort of coaching and advising and helping a bunch of heads of product figure out new roles. And sometimes it's somebody who's the leading product line or business unit as part of a larger platform. And sometimes it's the head of product who's running the whole organization. And more and more as they're considering and taking new roles, I get questions around how do I hit the ground running? And the reason that's become such a hot topic is historically when you took a new role, there was this idea of a 90-day plan around what you were going to do, who you were going to meet, what initiatives you were going to kick off. And I would say in this fast-paced era that we're living in, in product, there's no more 90-day plan. It's really a 30-day plan. And so it all gets compressed. And a lot of the things that you could sort of ramp up on slowly now really just need to be tackled head-on, probably within your first couple of weeks. And you need to make sure all the conversations you're having are with high-leverage people on high-leverage topics, and that you're working your way towards showing impact right off the bat. And I would say for me, you know, having done some product advisory work over the last couple of years, this is a trend I was already noticing. For example, if you're working with a CEO or a C-level person and you've been brought in to solve a particular problem, if you're spending time on boilerplate stuff or filling the air with, you know, sort of preamble, you can see them start to look at their watches and just kind of check the clock and say, like, how— what am I getting for paying this person by the hour? Right. And so there's this concept that I call insights per minute, which is as a product leader or any leader, you need to be sort of educating and enlightening the people you're supporting constantly. And I think that's true as you take a head of product role. People now expect you to immediately come in and help diagnose how to grow the product faster, how to monetize better, where the bodies are buried, how to improve collaboration with go-to-market. And they expect you to sort of do that with great insights and great operational inclination and instincts right off the bat. And so this connects to a larger thing I've noticed, which is before I became the head of product at a company, I always thought that role was very much at the whims of a CEO. So, you know, if a head of product gets along with the CEO, it's great. And if they don't, they're out basically. And I would say one thing I've learned from advising a lot of these people and my own experiences is it's not simply about the relationship between the head of product and the CEO. It's as much about the relationship with the cross-functional partners. So how does your head of sales perceive you? How does your head of customer success perceive you? How does your marketing leader perceive you in addition to sort of your head of engineering? And the reason that matters is all of those people are designed to bring the product to market and monetize it and expand on it. And the buck stops with product. And I've talked about this before in a previous 5 Minute Friday, which is Every other function in the company has sort of a bar that they're held to in terms of more marketers means more pipeline, more sellers means more deals, more customer success reps means better CSAT scores. And product is different in that every product person you bring in is supposed to give you more leverage, but that's a little bit hard to quantify, especially in the short term. And so product in a way gets a pass and more runway than some of these other roles. On the flip side, building bridges and creating value for your cross-functional partners is the way to sort of make sure you keep the job as a product leader. And so for me, if you're trying to hit the ground running as a new head of product at a B2B company, you've got to figure out the core flywheel and you got to say no to everything else. And so I have a visual that I'll include with this post, check it out. But to me, there's 6 things that you need to be doing right off the bat. The first is you got to figure out how simple and smooth is your onboarding flow. How long does it take? How does it compare to the competition? Where do customers fall out? Who buys but doesn't really get value? This is the basic, like, do we have a leaky bucket question? It's surprising to me how many people take over new product orgs and there's low-hanging fruit around onboarding and just getting people through the initial funnel that they fail to address. So that's number one is just make sure you're not losing customers for basic obvious things. The second is every product has an aha moment where customers feel like they have achieved some of the value. And with a lot of enterprise products, that time to value used to be pretty long when you think about a consultative sale and implementation and onboarding and change management, et cetera. And just like internal expectations of how quickly a product leader is going to have impact have shifted, so has the expectations of how quickly a product's going to provide value to a customer. So you need to diagnose very quickly what are the steps that you're ideal customer takes to get to that aha moment? What can be automated? What can be simplified? How many customers have even reached that aha moment? Right? Because your goal is to get as many referenceable customers as possible. That helps your sales teams with new deals. That helps your success teams with their metrics. And so you got to make sure what is the product doing to bring people to the aha moment? And is there again friction and low-hanging fruit to help simplify that? Third is, you know, you've got to make friends with the rank and file on the go-to-market side. And the best way to sort of endear yourself to them is to ask what are the paper cut issues that slow down deals, that derail demos, that stop customers from getting onboarding, that are the top trending pain points for the customer support team. You got to figure those out and you got to figure out how much of the roadmap is going towards that, if any. And if not, why not? These are the types of things which are bug fixes, documentation, education, quality of life things that can really improve the day-to-day for a customer success rep or a sales engineer. And I think by doing that, you really create sort of a bridge for those folks to give you more feedback and a belief that you're there to sort of help them as you co-go-to-market. The 4th thing I try to focus on is who are the most successful customers? You got to spend time with them and you got to ask them, how did you hear about the product? How did you decide to try the product? What convinced you to buy the product? And frankly, what led you to use the product with the most sophistication out of anybody else in the user base? Because you want to get as many customers using it in that pattern as possible. And you gotta figure out if it's replicable, what the product can do to replicate it. And if it's not replicable, what you can do about that as well. So I would spend time on the most successful customers. And then the 5th thing I think about when I'm trying to take over a new product org is what is the core job to be done? Like what is the customer promise? What is the main headline on the website? Too many times folks get caught up in new products and feature launches and this, that, the other. But remember, the main thing is the main thing. It's what is sold. It's what is deployed. It's what is implemented. It's what the mass majority of customers come to you for. So you got to ask yourself, is that thing bulletproof? Is it reliable? Is it functional? Is it streamlined? Is it monitored? Is it speedy? Because that's the thing that's going to derail all the other ambitions of the company if it's not. And then last but not least, I think, you know, in this era of build it and then figure out the rest later. You really have to think about how scalable your business is. And so one of the things I like to do is actually look at how the company makes money, what the cost to serve is, when that's going to break even, when it starts to become profitable. And if you have it, which portions of your account base are more profitable versus less profitable and why that is. And if you need to shift that in any directions, it'll help you make tons of friends with your finance team. So those are sort of the handful of things that I try to focus on. Like I said, there's a quick visual to help you remember it. And hopefully I'll be back in a week or two with another 5 Minute Friday, and maybe we'll do the video thing again. Bye!
