When you look at your product roadmap, pillars and flywheels play together to help you execute the business strategy of a company. It will also help you in scaling growth products. First, you should go back and think about your various pillars and flywheels. Then, you need to think of a roadmap that defines the vision for what you want to build in the short and long term.
Applying Your Pillars and Flywheel
For example, when we expanded our catalog, we had to go into every state and modify our product. In order to do that we needed to have a team of people that prioritized thinking about how do we do fast and low-cost catalog expansion. How do we build tools so that our content writers can get faster writing content? Then make it cheaper? Then can deploy it quickly with high quality? Now when we think about that whole business, we have a whole thematic around fast content development with high quality.
So the ultimate vision is that we could do what not what it used to take us maybe a year we could do in a month. So that is the driving force behind that part of the roadmap, which is how we are scaling growth.
Using The Pillars and Flywheel in Product Management
Here is how we use those two tools at Aceable. For exceeding expectations, we have a team of learning experts and a product thematic centered on disrupting the status quo. This allows our team to create a product that people haven’t seen before.
On winning or skipping page 1 or increasing LTV and reducing CAC. That, from a product perspective, means we have to have a super scalable marketing infrastructure so we operate multiple websites. How do we build out a system that allows our marketers to effectively manage the product at scale?
Finally for increasing LTV, introducing CAC is the newest part of our roadmap. We’ve been laser focused on getting our core markets out. Now, it’s about how do we add value-added products beyond the courses we offer. As a result, our margins increase and we are able to build a bigger catalog. This is what allows us to build more disruptive outcomes and get the flywheel going.
We’d like to use this concept of the pillars and flywheel because I think it’s very intuitive. Parlaying that into your product roadmap and that gives you a really nice way to actually align the conversation with every stakeholder in the company. Thus allowing for a streamlined scaling of growth for the product. This way there’s not a single person in the company that is not also focused on the same things.
About the speaker
Erin Defossé is the Chief Product Officer at Aceable - responsible for building, maintaining and executing the company’s product strategy and roadmap. Prior to joining Aceable, Erin was the SVP of Product at Bazaarvoice. Prior to his product management career, he was a spacecraft mission design engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In addition, Erin is the Founder of The Magellan International School in Austin and was Co-Founder and CTO of Isochron Data. Erin holds a Masters Degree in Aeronautics & Astronautics from Stanford University - and currently lives in Austin.