In this short advisory video, Ibrahim Bashir outlines a rapid‑onboarding framework for new heads of product at B2B companies. He stresses the importance of identifying the core product flywheel and ruthlessly saying no to non‑essential initiatives. He then details two of the six immediate priorities: (1) audit the onboarding funnel for “leaky bucket” symptoms—measure onboarding duration, benchmark against competitors, and pinpoint where customers drop off before receiving value; (2) map and accelerate the product’s “aha moment” by dissecting the steps a customer takes to achieve first‑value, automating or simplifying those steps, and increasing the number of referenceable customers to fuel sales and success metrics. The overall message is to focus on low‑hanging, high‑impact fixes that quickly demonstrate product impact.
Chapters
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 gotta figure out the core flywheel and you gotta 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 gotta 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, you know, 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, etc. 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 is going to provide value to a customer. So you need to diagnose very quickly what are the steps that your 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.
