Rami is the Chief Product Officer at Abnormal Security, where he leads the company’s product vision, strategy, and execution. In his masterclass, Rami walks through the steps necessary to build a world-class product from scratch, providing time-tested principles that enable product teams to come to life. Previously, Rami held various product leadership roles at Amazon Alexa, led product marketing and sales at Swagger (acquired) and led product management at Reverb (acquired) as VP of Product. Rami also led product management and marketing at Proofpoint, from company inception to IPO, for its inbound and outbound cybersecurity products.
So much of this is just around sequencing and I mentioned resource allocation and resource optimization, a bird in the hand. If you have something that's going well, there's probably more things you can do. To make that go even better, You're doubling down on something that works, from a risk perspective, it's lower risk. You take the expected value. I have a, I didn't know, 10 million ARR, product. And, with 90% certainty, I can probably grow that with some additional resources and, get to, 20 million versus a potential net new market that I don't have any data on, but let's say it's a much bigger market, but that has a 5% chance of taking off.
So there's definitely that trade-off of recognizing where you are on the risk spectrum. I think, it is important again, going back to sequencing and timing is for companies and product managers and executives [00:01:00] to recognize what your core competencies are as a company. And really, if you are moving forward into either product expansion or maybe even market expansion, where you can, seek, products in markets where those competencies can be differentiators, in solving problems for customers.
What does that do that perhaps takes the 5% probability of that net new market and bumps it up to 15% or 20%. So you're shaving golf risk by just thinking very deliberately as you try to do this. Just math the equation on, should we double down on our existing finger or do,this next thing at the end of the day, startups, we all have finite resources.
If you haven't reached product market fit, it doesn't make sense to try to explore something completely net new, unless you've decided that whatever cluster of markets are going up. Just doesn't make sense then, go after that new one. But if you have reached product market fit, [00:02:00] then, then obviously that's when you would want to start doing the things I mentioned earlier.
And the other things I would say is there's also like these extra analogies, these exceptions to every situation that might alter this, it could be that there's a strategic reason to fund a small team. that, it's just strategic to that unique situation. And that might, that might push you even into that 5% probability market.
and there's all kinds of reasons for that. one way to think about it. it's a low cost call option to test out, different opportunities for expansion. So maybe to summarize, I don't think there is a hard and fast like rule, but I would caution people to, Do not go too broad, too quickly.
There's a lot to be said around focus,and doing something extremely well as a company to be recognized for that. If you look around in the technology landscape, it's rare, very rare, even for really large companies, that [00:03:00] have been proven successes that they have more than one, maybe two.
products or business units that are highly successful, obviously for acquisition that's no longer the case and a corollary to that is the fact that even between those one or two successful products, each of those products might have 50 features, but there's probably only one or two really important.
use cases, the hero use cases for lack of better term that are served by those products. So that means there's a whole bunch of other resource allocation across engineering and product and marketing. That you could argue is a waste. Now that waste exists, because again, from a portfolio perspective, if one takes off, it's a call option of one takes off, then you're well served, but, the importance of focus cannot be understated.
