Product excellence must drive every decision

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Des Traynor (Intercom co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer) emphasizes that product excellence must drive every decision. He argues that **product should come first, **even perfect marketing or finance can’t save a bad product, but a great product can compensate for many other flaws. Having a clear vision and focus is essential: your vision is “the ceiling for your success,” and without it “all roads are equal.” Traynor advises founders to articulate why they exist (the change they want to make) and to continuously question what trends or customer outcomes justify their product. By focusing on the customer’s desired outcome, not on products or categories, you identify true competitors and build enduring solutions (As he says: if an outcome is real, customers already solve it somehow, your job is to improve on it.)

Finding Product–Market Fit

Traynor stresses the importance of honing in on a “cluster of demand” or minimum viable segment (MVS). Product–market fit comes when you target a very specific group with the same problem, using the product similarly and willing to pay for it. Ideally “you build only one feature and everyone uses it the same way,” yielding “a really small technical footprint and a really large revenue base.” He warns against diluting the core: as new customers trickle in from varied channels or use cases, the cluster can “unbundle”, leaving no two users alike. In practice, he advises startups to:

• Deepen Customer Understanding. Keep talking to users. Traynor recounts conducting hundreds of interviews at Intercom to learn why customers used the product. Early on, every customer problem “we had also experienced” ourselves, making the first features obvious. After growth, they interviewed 100 customers and found three core goals (sales, retention, support), which guided their roadmap for years. Use interviews to map each segment’s **job to be done, **understanding pain, goals, budget, and channels.
• Segment Relentlessly. User feedback often seems chaotic at first. Traynor notes: “If everyone loves it, that’s good, and if everyone hates it, that’s also good. But if it’s all over the place … then you’ve got too many different types of use cases.” In other words, unfocused feedback means no clear segment. Re-group responses by company size, industry, or persona until patterns emerge. “Keep going until you find sense in the chaos,” he advises, because “feedback is just noise until you segment it.”
• Prioritize and Measure. Tie every feature or initiative to a clear metric. Intercom uses Net Dollar Retention (NDR) as a north star, new features are screened by whether they will improve NDR. They also align metrics with the mission (“make the internet more personal”), breaking success into three customer-centric buckets: Growth (how many businesses use us), Performance (how many end users are reached), and Behavior (how many conversations happen). Every project is judged on these goals.
• Launch and Iterate Quickly. After research and planning, launch fast. Traynor cautions, “Some companies are terrified the market might reject them, so they never ask the market to accept them… by not launching, they do fail.” He insists we’ll “learn so much more by launching than by theorizing in your head.” In summary, finding PMF means owning a clear niche, learning deeply about it, and iterating rapidly within that focus.

Product Strategy and Prioritization

A core theme in Traynor’s talks is learning to say NO. Building a great product means ruthlessly protecting your focus and coherence. “If you’re building a product, you have to be great at saying no… The only word is no.” Adding every requested feature dilutes your product into “a repository of features, not a product.” Traynor and Intercom’s blog lay out dozens of tempting excuses to add features and counter each one. For example:

• “But a customer asked for it.” This is feature blackmail. No single customer should dictate the product. “No customer can be more important than a good product,” he argues. Serving one user’s special need often takes value away from the many.
• “But it’s easy to build.” Even small tasks have hidden complexity. Intercom warns, “Don’t be seduced [by a] ‘but it’s just 5 minutes’ estimate.” Every feature adds subtle overhead. Small changes on the surface can create lasting maintenance and UX costs.
• “But everyone is asking for it.” Raw counts can mislead. One blog quips: “Are you really going to say no to all those faces?… You have to. Because the majority of your users will suffer otherwise.” The question is not how many asked, but whether a feature is truly valuable and used by all customers.
• “But competitors have it.” Copying rivals is rarely wise. Traynor bluntly says this trend relegates you to “deliver yesterday’s technology tomorrow.” Competitors may be experimenting or even failing; they are not smarter by default. He also notes fast followers can only copy what, not the why behind your product.

The guiding principle is to keep your product cohesive. Early in the Intercom blog: “Building a great product isn’t about creating tons of tangentially related features. It’s about delivering a cohesive product with well-defined parameters.” All of Des’s advice on new features ties back to focus: add something only if it truly fits your mission and core segment.

In practice this means structuring your roadmap and meetings to weed out “snacking” tasks. Traynor likes Hunter Walk’s 2×2 of effort vs impact, warning that low-effort, low-impact “snacks” feel tempting but lead nowhere. “If you want to have a high impact team, stay away from low-impact work. Eat, don’t snack,” he advises. In short, prioritize high-impact work even if it’s hard, and reject quick wins that don’t move the needle.

In summary: real product decisions are hard. Traynor urges product managers to embrace that: “It requires you to say, ‘This is a really great idea… Well done. But we’re not going to build it. Instead, here’s what we’re doing.” Eliminating many “great” ideas is the price of focus. Only by saying no can you keep the product coherent and the core needs satisfied.

Customer Feedback and Product Improvement

Building with customer insight is a cornerstone of Traynor’s approach. He stresses continuous improvement grounded in real user problems. He cautions against assuming that simply shipping code equals improvement: “Kaizen is the philosophy of continuous improvement… but shipping code doesn’t mean that you’re making any significant product improvements.” Meaningful improvements come from understanding value and targeting enhancements accordingly.

When adding new features, be conservative: “New features are risky. You have to be very confident they will be valued,” he writes. Customers often say “yes” to any new toy, but that doesn’t mean it’s a priority for them. A telling tip: if you instead ask customers to trade off priorities (e.g. speed vs features), you’ll see the real preference, typically everyone values performance and simplicity.

Instead of chasing features, look at improving what exists. Intercom breaks this into three ways:

1. **Deliberate improvements: **make a feature better for users who already love it.
2. **Frequency improvements: **tweak a feature to get users to use it more often (e.g. adding items to an activity feed).
3. **Adoption improvements: **make a feature more accessible or attractive so non-users start using it (e.g. integrations that onboard reluctant users).

The key is to focus on changes that matter. He advises to watch for features used infrequently or by only part of the base and remove friction there. In every case, coordinate your changes with customer goals, always ask, “What outcome is this user trying to achieve?”

In practice, Traynor’s teams constantly cycle customer feedback into improvements. For example, when internal discussions revealed confusion about Intercom’s complexity, the team sculpted the onboarding flow (see below) to clarify goals. Over years they learned customers primarily use Intercom for sales messaging, retention/feedback loops, or support, and their roadmap prioritized those outcomes. In Traynor’s words, every feature or launch is judged by whether it helps customers achieve what they need, not just by technical or anecdotal appeal.

User Onboarding and Activation

Traynor devotes much advice to onboarding users effectively. He reminds us that getting a signup is only half the battle, activating and retaining them is crucial. He outlines a modern “Onboarding 3.0” process that starts by treating onboarding as helping customers achieve their success, not pushing company metrics.

A practical summary of his onboarding advice:

• Understand User Jobs. Identify the job each user signed up for. Intercom asks new signups what goal they want to achieve. This frames the rest of onboarding. For example, someone might sign up intending to “improve team productivity” via project management, or to “get promoted” via using analytics. Tailoring examples and messaging to those real jobs makes onboarding relevant.
• Define Success Paths. For each user job, outline what success looks like. What key tasks will make the user feel the product is solving their problem? Then guide the user through those tasks. Early steps should be very simple and demonstrate value instantly. Traynor notes that new users “are super simple” initially, so the first actions in Intercom must be easy, if you require a heavy action (like creating a complex messaging campaign) on day one, “you’ll never get past that step.” Instead, start with something quick that highlights value, then progressively introduce power features. Designing onboarding flows with short “task time” (meaningful user work) and minimal “tool time” (clicking around) is key.
• Targeted Communication. As users progress, send in-app and email messages that help them move forward. Unlike generic time-based emails, these should be based on where the user is in the journey. For example, if a user has signed up but never sent a message, trigger a tip about sending their first message. Traynor points out that most trial communications are mistimed, it’s more effective to watch user activity and “send messages that help them get there.” Intercom’s own Smart Campaigns feature was built with this principle.
• Early Warning Signals. Don’t wait for failure. He compares waiting until a customer churns before reaching out to “waiting until you see divorce papers before checking how your spouse is doing.” Instead, define what “failure” looks like in the product (e.g. inactivity for X days) and proactively message or assist before it’s too late.

These steps may seem like good product design (Traynor admits onboarding often maps back to Good Product Design™), but the point is to prioritize user success as the way to grow. As he concludes, focus on “help[ing] your customers be successful… and you’ll find there’s low hanging fruit, and lots of it.”

Growth, Scaling, and Metrics

When it comes to scaling a product-first startup, Traynor’s advice is to follow the product’s lead and measure carefully. He notes that Intercom celebrates product milestones (feature adoption, usage growth) far more than fundraising or valuation, the latter are merely “trailing indicators of the greater work that’s happening.” In line with this, they structure growth metrics around core customer outcomes (discussed above) rather than vanity metrics.

A few key points:

• Tying Product to Business Metrics: Even before robust NDR data exists, tie changes to your mission. For Intercom, everything maps to one of three goals (more businesses, more conversations, more end users). This way the team knows which bucket (growth, performance, behavior) any feature will move.
• Prioritize High Leverage Work: Traynor highlights that as companies grow, one should look for features that maximize impact with minimal effort (especially important given added sales/marketing/support costs). “You have to think about the total cost of ownership of that feature,” he advises. In practice, that means constantly asking “how little can we do and how much can we get from it?” designing product expansions that scale efficiently.
• Content and Acquisition: (While not always explicit in quotes, Des has noted in interviews that early Intercom growth was fueled by content marketing and word of mouth.) In general, he encourages teams to segment aggressively rather than chasing every new user, to avoid unbundling the core (as discussed in PMF above). Ultimately, sustainable growth comes from loyal customers spreading the word because you solved their real problem, not from chasing every feature request or demographic at once.
• Patience: A recurring theme from his talks is patience for growth. In describing product-first companies, he notes they are often “very patient for growth.” In other words, focus on long-term product-market alignment rather than demanding overnight scale. If the product truly fits a strong MVS and you keep improving, the growth will follow.

Company Building and Team Culture

Traynor’s philosophy extends beyond product into culture and people. He famously quips, “If you get product really right, you can mess most things up and clean them up later. But if your product is terrible, you get found out.” Still, building and scaling a company requires careful attention to people and alignment:

• Founding Team Alignment: Early on, make sure co-founders share the vision and define roles. Traynor warns that the wrong co-founders can doom a startup. Choose partners who complement each other and commit to the mission.
• Early Hires: The first employees are critical. They must believe in what you’re doing and why, just as much as you do. Hire people who will amplify the vision and bring needed skills. (As Intercom grew, they found their founding engineers and product folks were the ones who really bought into why they existed, so they could maintain direction.)
• Scale and Management: As you grow, problems become people problems. Managing performance, communication and collaboration are hard. Traynor notes, “No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem.” Empower teams appropriately but avoid falling into the trap of “rolling up your sleeves” to do it all yourself. Engineers must learn to manage, designers to delegate; otherwise you burn out. Build processes for performance reviews and clear metrics for teams as you scale.
• People → Product → Profit: A simple rule he uses is that great companies have three ingredients: people, product, and profit. Get the people right (with the right hires, culture, and leadership), and a strong product will follow. Profitability (or sustainable business metrics) then follows from having both.
• Competition and Strategy: Finally, Traynor advises startups to focus inward rather than obsess over rivals. Fast followers may copy you, but without your vision they usually fail. He notes: “First mover advantage is frequently misunderstood and almost always overrated.” Concentrate on delivering unique value, as he puts it, faster execution limits followers to “shipping yesterday’s ideas tomorrow.” And remember: **the only competitor that matters is yourself, **keep improving your product, not just matching others.

Sustainable Business and Strategy

Des cautions that a great product doesn’t automatically make a viable business. In an Intercom essay he writes bluntly, “solving a real problem with a good product [does] not magically create a successful software business. That’s never guaranteed.” There are common pitfalls to avoid:

• Beware small, rare problems. A product can be well-designed yet target a tiny niche. Traynor charts a matrix of problem size/frequency and notes that “small, rare problems” (even if feasible and desirable) are often not viable markets. People won’t pay much for infrequent fixes, and ads or network effects rarely work. You can make a lovely product but still fail if the market isn’t big or frequent enough.
• Beware cheap, complex products. If you price very low, your unit economics must constrain costs. He points out: at ~$5/mo, you cannot do expensive marketing, you cannot offer much support, so your product must be exceptionally intuitive and bug-free. Otherwise your onboarding and support costs will swamp revenue. In general, match your price to the effort you require: “you can control your price” if something truly needs manual help.
• Beware unsolved or undiscovered problems. You can’t sell a solution to a problem the customer hasn’t bought. Traynor warns about the flood of “all-in-one” tools promising to fix unnoticed inefficiencies. If users are indifferent (“just remember which photos went to Facebook vs Instagram”), then no product can compel them. Make sure your users feel the pain you’re solving; if they don’t care to solve it, you’ll likely fail.
• Beware missing founder–market fit. Some problems are best tackled by those who live them. He advises founders to stick to domains they know. If you have never managed a large team, building enterprise HR software is risky, you may not truly understand the problem. Sometimes a better approach is a team spun out of a company that felt the pain, rather than outsiders guessing.

In short, survival is the ultimate product strategy. As Traynor concludes, “Quality isn’t enough” if the business isn’t sustainable. Even the most elegant solution must support a viable business model. If you can’t reach customers or monetize properly, your “phenomenal product” will wither. Always consider business viability (market size, pricing, acquisition costs) alongside user desirability.

By synthesizing Traynor’s talks and writings, we see a coherent philosophy: deeply understand and focus on a real customer need, relentlessly protect your product’s core, iterate quickly on what works, and scale around talented people. His guidance, from demanding that the team say no to distractions, to crafting user-centric onboarding flows, to aligning product and company metrics, provides a blueprint. In his own words, prioritize customer success, clear vision, and product coherence, and “help your customers be successful… you’ll find there’s low hanging fruit, and lots of it.”