3 Verbs & 3 Adjectives: An Intentional Product Strategy for your Startup

Picture this Scene

Setting: the local watering hole after work or on Zoom with cocktails.

Actors: Two friends who work in the same profession. They also happen to be your ideal customer profile/target buyer (ICP).

After a drink, this exchange happens:

Friend one: "You need to check out this product! It rules!" (This product happens to be yours.)

Friend two: "Why - what is so great about it?"

Friend one: "Well it allows me to do XYZ." (XYZ are verbs that speak to something friend one can now do with your product better than before.)

Friend two: "Wow. That's cool. Why are you so fired up about it?"

Friend one: "Well what makes the product cool/special is that it's ABC." (ABC are adjectives used to describe your product.)

Friend two: "Double wow. I need to check it out. Can you introduce me?"

One of your customers cared so much about your product that they couldn't wait to tell their peers—completely unprompted. This doesn't have to be a fantasy if you are intentional about your product strategy and roadmap.

For those that know me, I spend most of my time with founders at the intersection of product and go-to-market (GTM). On the GTM front, I work with founders to ensure their initial ICP is correct and their messaging is nailed. Without getting that initial ICP/messaging pair correct, it's very hard to deliver repeatable revenue success. On messaging, the focus is on:

• ​WHY THIS (why does the buyer need what you have)
• ​WHY NOW (why does the buyer need what you have now)
• ​WHY YOU (why is what you offer better than alternatives)

Intentional Product Strategy - Knowing Your Kernel

If I have the time, I try before partnering with a founder to have a 60-90 minute product demo and roadmap discussion. Does the plan for the product back up the three whys above? Is there a kernel there today and a strategy forward that makes sense at a 1,000-foot level?

This may seem silly as teams at investment may have 1-3 devs max, no dedicated PM, no dev manager, and no real release process. There's no time to talk strategy when founders are just trying to build the core product and quickly fill gaps their early customers tell them they need. For the record, this is an intro discussion—post-close, we spend more time together on product strategy, especially as a founder's R&D team grows.

The Three Verbs (the what)

I never use the word strategy in these discussions. I ask the founder first what are their three verbs. Usually, they ask what I mean. I replay the bar scene: if this happens for their buyers in the future, what would they say about you? What would they say you allow them to do (verbs)? What outcomes can they now achieve that they couldn't before? These are the jobs to be done by your buyer, and as a founder, you must know these for your target ICP.

For example (using Salesforce circa 2009): salesforce.com allows me to run a consistent marketing and sales process, pinpoint the gaps in my funnel performance, and reinforce with sales teams what they need to do better.

The Three Adjectives (the how)

I then ask what values will guide their team's delivery of the verbs outlined above. What three adjectives would your buyer in the bar use to describe you? These adjectives reflect how your customers feel about HOW you allow them to do or achieve the verbs and what they find so positive about that. Relevant adjectives generally fall within these buckets: cost of ownership, ease of set-up, ease of integration, ease/amount of usage for relevant users, quality of post-sales support, ease of deriving meaningful insights, etc.

For example (using Salesforce circa 2009): salesforce.com is easier to deploy, simpler to customize, and is pre-integrated with all my upstream and downstream tools.

Note: No credit for adjectives like fast, quality code, and secure—those are core requirements for any world-class product.

Why Product Intentionality Matters at Seed Stage & Beyond

Some believe being too intentional too early is not useful or could be dangerous if you don't have enough market data yet. To that, I say—hogwash. At the seed stage, we are not >50% confident in any direction. The key is to have a core set of theses you believe in, which you will adjust as you get feedback from the market.

The seed stage is all about ensuring you are a learning organization that responds and adjusts in real-time—but if you lack intentionality or are running too many experiments, you won't be able to make sense of what the market tells you.

Intentionality is your closest friend during the seed stage because:

• ​You have limited time, cash, and resources.
• ​To raise an A round in 18-24 months, you need to hit a certain revenue or usage milestone aligned against a core message. The goal is to be focused and prove just that one product/with one message/with one motion/to one target buyer works.
• ​You may take anyone who will buy your product, even if they're not the right long-term fit. Some startups let these early customers drive their entire product roadmap.
• ​Without product intentionality—defining the core ICP and your Verbs and Adjectives—you make things harder. It's much easier for leads to land and reps to excel when you are clear on why you matter to a buyer.

Product Intentionality for Your Phases of Growth

The 3 verbs and 3 adjectives approach holds up for a long time as a baseline for your strategy, which usually moves along these phases. There are four types of company/product expansion:

Expansion Type 1 – The Baseline: Deliver Better on Your Existing Verbs & Adjectives

This phase is about doing a far better job of fulfilling your promise to your early customers and initial buyers. The verbs and adjectives stay the same, though you may refine them. As you build mission-based teams, you may split up your verbs/whats and assign each to a dedicated scrum team.

You also start to have real feedback regarding won/lost deals. For lost deals, split up lost to competition from lost to do nothing. The latter tells you your verbs are off; for deals lost to competition, perhaps your verbs are incomplete or your adjectives are lacking. Use that feedback to hone your verbs and adjectives and drive delivery toward a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP).

You also get feedback from customers about what they need to love you—this needs to be incorporated against your verbs and adjectives.

During this phase, seek answers to core roadmap questions:

• ​User Interface: What screen are you for your users? Do you replace an existing screen? Are you asking them to use you as a second screen? Do you offer enough value for them to bother?
• ​Integration: How important is seamless integration into existing tools/workflows? If important, be API first and define a longer-term integration strategy.

This is your product kernel—don't lose your way on your core verbs and adjectives and always incorporate deal/customer feedback.

Expansion Type 2 – Deliver for New Flavors of Your Original ICP

This phase is about serving different versions of your core buyer:

• ​Market Segment: Expand from SMB to MM or ENT, or vice versa. For SMB, invest in product-led/self-serve/simplistic packaging; for ENT, deliver on scalability, extensibility, and security.
• ​User Sophistication: Target less mature/sophisticated users with the right pricing & packaging and proper instruction/guidance.
• ​User Hierarchy: Expand from first-level managers to VPs or ICs.

The verbs likely do not change much; adjectives are likely the same but their priority may differ for new flavors of buyers.

Do not lose your way—if you are super easy to use, enterprises love that. Just because they want more customizability, etc., doesn't mean they will trade that for ease of use.

Expansion Type 3 – Deliver More Products to the Same ICP

When everything is going great, ask: "What's our expansion/NRR story?" To sell more products to your target ICP, you need to offer a new verb—allow them to do something additional. If it's just a better version of what you already sold, that's an included feature. For an additional charge, it must be a new verb. The adjectives likely stay the same.

Rule of thumb: If additional products don't add up to at least 35-50% of the initial sale, sales reps won't bother to sell them. Be thoughtful about additional products for additional revenue.

Expansion Type 4 – Deliver/Sell Products to a New ICP

Within your customers, there may be a natural extension to buyers adjacent to your existing buyers. If you offer a product to that new buyer that meets their needs, there is incremental benefit. For these new buyers, you will be delivering on different verbs; adjectives likely stay the same.

This is much easier than picking a brand new ICP with no adjacency. Without adjacency, you may need a completely new set of adjectives and verbs, and your GTM teams know nothing about how to market, sell, and service this customer. This is a lot of context switching and should be avoided if possible.

Summary & Some Parting Thoughts

The "verb & adjective" construct and the different product expansion types can help you think through your product strategy. The key is ensuring you are thinking about your product from the perspective of how your buyer would describe you—because if they are raving about you, that engenders customer trust and love.

Ensure your go-to-market organization is aligned with your product focus and future strategy. Marketing, sales, and service organizations should be fine-tuned to your initial ICP focus. If you expand up or down market, understand the nuances in execution required to succeed.

If you expand with more new products, ensure alignment on how they will be marketed and who will sell them. If you expand to a brand new ICP, ensure marketing/product marketing care, and determine if the same rep sells to both ICPs or if an additional rep is needed.

As you get larger, prioritization becomes much harder. You no longer have a small group of devs who can flex and deliver whatever is needed. You now have mission-based teams with less fungibility and more choices/routes.

This is where product intentionality and the model provided become your friend. Some final tips:

• ​Always gauge how you are delivering vs the verbs and adjectives of your initial ICP—don't forget the core.
• ​Make hard calls and finish one job "enough" before starting another. Opening too many fronts at once leads to delivering less than 50% of what buyers desire.
• ​Avoid the peanut approach to staffing/resourcing—no "10 teams of two devs" doing a little bit of everything. Your customers and R&D teams will be dissatisfied if you spread resources too thin.