🔮 Anthony Murphy: Product Pathways, Founder

13 minutes with Anthony Murphy: Founder of Product Pathways. Predicting the future. Strategic discovery. Seeking out early adopters. Balancing short-term revenue versus long-term vision. Modeling the future. Hiring. Technical architecture and debt. Capacity. BJ Fogg's behavioral model. Shipping super early, even when it's a concept. Setting goals. What needs to be true?

21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.

What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?

Really good question and an interesting one for me. As a product coach, I don't work with a single team. I work with multiple clients, multiple companies and product teams all over the world. But, one of the benefits of that is I get to see interesting challenges.

1) Predicting the future. If I think about some of the clients I have right now, probably one of the most interesting I'm working with now is what I would deem as a horizon three product. Essentially, the horizon model is near term, mid term, far term. They're essentially shaping the future doing some really cool, market-leading AI, 3D rendering technology, but a cool market for that doesn't exist today. So how do you convert that into revenue? That's a whole other challenge. We’ve been spending the last 12 months in doing that. Part of it is ”Well, what does the future look like? How do we predict the future?” So we've been spending a lot of time doing modeling on previous trends, like the rise of chat as opposed to calling people up, and all these other trends. Essentially, using them as predictive models to try and predict the future. Predicting the future in order to create a market in order to create revenue.

2) Strategic discovery. We need to have confidence in all those things. They are just models. It doesn't mean that that’s exactly what the future's going to hold. We need to be able to validate some of that, gain confidence in it, and really calculate the value of whether that's something that's worthwhile doing.

3) Seeking out early adopters and innovators. We spend a lot of time naturally seeking out early adopters and innovators. They really are our core market today. If you think about the diffusion of innovators, they're going to be on core market today. And then one day, that will become an everyday thing that everyone's using, and then we'll really crack into that. But that’s one of the things that we really focused on. That's a real hard thing to do, especially it's a B2B product. So how do you work out B2B innovators? It's it's a unique challenge, but that's definitely where our revenue is coming from today.

What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?

Working with lots of clients, I see some common challenges. I spend a lot of my time working with startups, or product managers in startups and a lot of scaling companies.

1) Balancing short-term revenue versus long-term vision. I think the biggest challenge that companies dealing with right now, as well as another client of mine, is balancing short-term revenue, or that's stability of revenue, versus long-term vision and gain. If you use that client as an example, their market, their future, doesn't exist today. So it's hard to make revenue off something that doesn't exist, but you need to make some revenue, you call it the completely investment-funded. That's not gonna work out longterm. You need revenue, but there's a danger of starting to fall into this trap of building something for today and missing out on that future, and not being ready for that future, when it comes. So that's a huge kind of challenge. I mean, I've been overcoming it in some of those ways that I've kind of mentioned before.

2) Modeling the future. That's a really interesting one. We really overcame that by looking at previous trends and building a few models around that, but a super unique challenge that I haven't had to deal with before.

3) For one of my clients, they had really big retention issue. Classic leaky funnel. You got plenty leads coming in, but not everyone is staying in there. So, I spent a lot of time with them, reshaping their product strategy to understand those gaps and balancing that. It was a good challenge.

What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?

1) Hiring. I'm working with a VP of Product at the moment at a growing startup, and probably the biggest roadblock we have right now is just c. They’re growing, they’ve got to grow, got to go with it, get more people, but the market's super competitive, and I think most people and most product leaders and people in product and tech know this, salaries are through the roof. People are hard to come by, n...