A short talk by Jason M. Lemkin warning CEOs about the danger of changing product priorities too quickly to satisfy investors. He gives an anecdote about building a rarely-used 'notes' feature for a contract-signing product at Adobe Sign (formerly EchoSign) to please an investor, which was used by very few customers even through acquisition.
I would be careful with the advice to change too quickly. I'd be careful and always. And it's a mistake we can make as CEOs, especially, and it's an understandable mistake is you can do too much for your VCs and money, right? And I used to joke about, someone told me this in many years ago that every software product has a feature that that's only used by one of their investors, okay? And if you went to Adobe Sign, which Deco Sign was started in 2005, if you went until about a year ago, there was a notes tab so that when you signed a contract, okay, you could write some notes about it. Hey, this was Michael and Jason's contract. And that note was searchable through our search index. And it was very cool. And one of our investors said, you got to have, like, I know all about contracts. You got to make notes on your contracts. And so we built it. It didn't take that long. All the way through our acquisition, like, three people used it.
