Learning from the Walkman

Ambiguity kills. Negative roadmaps. Less is more.

1979 Walkman

I spent a couple of hours advising one of portfolio companies yesterday. They have a very promising early product, a growing and engaged customer base, and a compelling vision. Jason and I are thrilled to be investors. The founder epitomizes steely determination.

The founder asked me to help her and the product leader review the product scope and roadmap now that they have got their funding round done. My goal in these sessions is to provide some guidance and suggestions, give them a framework to make decisions, rather than play at being product manager.

I wish I had remembered the Walkman story to emphasise a point I was making, so I’ll redress that here.

First a bit of history

The Walkman was first created because Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka wanted to be able to listen to music on a long flight. It went from concept to product in record time and ended up selling over 50 million units. The first model the TPS-L2, was released in 1979.

The story of how the Walkman was created is lovely. So many lessons in there for large and small companies: dealing with middle management scepticism, category creation, cognitive referent, innovation is not always new technology, complementarity, the power of a deadline, branding, code reuse, genuine executive commitment and more. There is whole strategy degree in the Walkman story. Also those orange headphones were the business.

Please watch this.

Thanks for Lenny Rachitsky for the video. His substack and podcast is well worth subscribing to. Do watch and listen to the full episode with Rory Sutherland once you have finished reading this post. Rory is a genius marketer.

“You don’t want any ambiguity about what this thing is for.”

As Rory notes, the Walkman was wildly successful because it served a singular purpose.

I’m a big fan of keeping product scope really tight, especially at seed stage. Be known for doing one thing really really well. It creates clarity for your engineering, your marketing, your sales, your investors and most importantly your customers and prospects.

The art is finding a problem that is important enough to solve and that is not solved well by broader scope incumbents. It needs to be awkward to solve, but not almost impossible, nor trivial. Solve that one thing in a novel way that is obviously better than the incumbents. Make the purchase decision really simple. Enable buyers to very quickly qualify in and out. Keep the gap between deployment and customer value as narrow as you can. Provide proof that you solve it.

Once you have clarity on the problem you are solving for, it is often challenging to keep feature discipline, especially when one of your early adopters asks for a feature that is a bit outside your scope, but kind of fits, or you see a competitor getting a bit of traction close by, or you reckon it will allow you to tweak your ACV. Creep is a invidious thing.

There are going to be 100,000s of companies that don’t need or want your thing, and you need to be cool with that. Be known for doing one meaningful thing, really well, for a coherent cohort of customers. Nail that, and you are well on your way to your Series A and beyond.

A technique to help keep focus

Build a negative roadmap. Take note of those things you would like to do, and make a clear commitment not to do them now. Timebox them like you do a positive roadmap. Review the negative roadmap with your key stakeholders. By being deliberate and consistent in assessing and confirming what you are not doing, you will approach what you must do with renewed clarity. Any new feature must help reduce ambiguity about what you do, and who for.

Shifting something from the negative roadmap to the positive roadmap will mean that you need to take something off the positive roadmap. This reminds you of the cost of vacillation.

Like the record button on the Walkman, most of the time, less is more. Make frugal innovation your friend.

As I do, here is tune for you. I remember borrowing my friend Giles’s Walkman at school for a couple of days. This was the first song I listened to on it. I also rewound the mix tape cassette with a pencil as the batteries were nearly dead.