Introducing Big Bets, a newsletter about building new products
Companies that are past the early start-up phase have - almost by definition - proved they can do one thing well. But what about the next thing? In pursuit of growth, companies want to build and launch new products. But, no matter how robust your strategy is, not every idea you have for a new product will be a winner. In acknowledgement of this, many people have started calling these projects ‘big bets’.
I’ve worked on big bets myself, in the start-up world as CPO of money transfer start-up WorldRemit, and in bigger organisations like the UK government and WhatsApp, where I’m currently a product director. I’ve learned from experience that they’re not easy to do well.
So I became fascinated by how other product leaders run big bets - where do the ideas come from in the first place? What’s the best kind of team and structure? How do you know when to call time on a bet that’s not working? What do you do with a bet that becomes wildly successful? I started having chats with people who’ve worked on interesting bets. I’ve spoken to people who’ve run successful bets and ones that failed - for the wrong reasons and for the right ones. I’ve spoken about bets in start-ups, like Deliveroo Plus, and big organisations, like BBC iPlayer. Along the way I’ve heard many interesting stories and learned a lot of interesting lessons, which I thought were worth sharing more widely.
Here’s how I’m defining big bets:
A new product, service or substantial feature, which is risky in some way. The risk could be around the market for the product, the technology, the business model or something else.
Its success would be meaningful to your business, and trying it costs you meaningful time, money and / or customer love.
There are companies who are famous for doing this well, like Amazon (e.g. AWS) and Google (e.g. Gmail) - but much smaller companies are also taking bets all the time, and pretty much any company above a certain size needs to be thinking about it.
So if you’re interested in hearing from these people too, please do subscribe to this newsletter to receive semi-regular emails diving into one big bet at a time. And if you’ve been working on a big bet you’d like to talk about, send me an email! In the meantime, tell your friends!