The Tech-Bro Blueprint To Creating A Unicorn Product Company

How to guarantee failure by replacing competence with hubris

Photo by Rita Morais on Unsplash

1. Create a tech-first solution in search of a market. When asked if you’re solving an existing problem, proclaim “We’re market makers.”
2. Have a mission to be the world’s best for everyone. And I mean everyone. “This thing has a massive TAM.”
3. Start by telling the press and investors that you’re going to make a “dent in the universe” with your new tech. No small plans.
4. Invite all your drinking buddies from Yale and Stanford to give you a couple of million as pre-seed despite zero market validation and pay for all the PR/Tech Crunch articles hyping up the team. That should buy you enough runway to hire and underpay women and BIPOC under you to come up with an actual plan before you have to raise your actual seed round. (source)
5. Set a unreasonable roadmap of deliverables and justify your aggressive goals by hiring “10x engineers”. Bonus points if these engineers all look like the founder.
6. Hire lots of people. Use your hiring metrics as an alternative for accretive growth. Tweet things like, “We have 100 open job recs. Growth is nuts right now.”
7. Release PR statements about your “design-digital-customer-human-equity-innovation-AI-humanity-sustainability-environmentally-accessibility-growth” led transformation strategy.
8. Stand up several product teams to work in parallel on separate initiatives. Explain this parallel work as experiments but leave out the fact you’re not testing anything but relying on the “founder’s vision” to provide direction.
9. Force teams to converge on a solution as soon as possible. Ideally, have the founder make the decision on what to work on instead of using any discovery process.
10. Have VP of Product present 3-year roadmap with specific features and delivery dates at industry conference without consulting the team. Then tell the product teams to deliver on time, ideally on Slack so you don’t have to look them in the eyes when you drop that bomb. (source)
11. Be sure to tell prospective clients your platform already does something that is at least 2 years out in that roadmap and then reprioritize everything in the backlog just in case. (source)
12. Discourage teams to cross pollinate or talk to each other. Better yet, create incentives for them to compete against each other.
13. Focus everything and everybody on quarterly OKRs or some other arbitrary short term goal.
14. Fund initiatives as full-blown projects without any data.
15. Build features based on “customer requests” and what sales is telling you they need to remain competitive.
16. Avoid shipping until the product is perfect. Ideally, have the founder sign off on every detail to ensure it really is perfect.
17. Reorg every 18 months while keep the same leadership in place.
18. Do whatever your board suggests regardless of the fact that they only ever provide “when we” anecdotes from their startup 20 years ago.
19. Give all senior leaders one week to figure out how to lay off 30% of their team while insisting remaining employees meet scope and timeline expectations.
20. Tell laid off employees you take responsibility for layoffs the same day as excitedly sharing you latest feature release on TikTok that was built by the team you just laid off. (source)
21. Give your sales team all the budget they need to hire 50 cold callers and set up incessant robo-dialers. Rate the cold callers based on how many times they tell prospective customers how much you’re “crushing it.”
22. Hire similar people to manage marketing, except they’ll be rated on the percentage of their marketing messages that encourage viewers to “smash the subscribe button.”
23. Leadership takes full credit for the developments and innovations made by their team. Often referring to them as just resources, pixel pushers or lazy. (source)
24. When all else fails, spend $1million on a new branding effort. “Make the logo bigger!”
25. When you fail again, to hockey stick at launch, change all your marketing to involve “AI” and hire a VP of Growth.
26. When all else fails once more: Foster paranoia, create enemies, proudly proclaim you’re a “wartime CEO”.

[Thank you to all my wonderful product peeps who contributed to this list via my original post on LinkedIn. Your snark and battle wounds are not going to waste.]