HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands

by David Cancel, Erik Devaney (Illustrator), Dave Gerhardt (Editor)

Are you communicating with your customers on a regular basis? Do you know how to manage and prioritize customer feedback once you’ve gathered it? When it comes to building a great product, a great team, and a great brand, relying solely on the opinions of internal stakeholders will get you nowhere. The key to achieving HYPERGROWTH is being customer-driven. So if you’re ready to start putting your customers first, keep reading... What You’ll A New Approach to Product Management and Developing SaaS Products People Love Today, there’s no excuse for not communicating with customers on a daily basis. Messaging has exploded, new generations are focused on 1:1 communication by default, and artificial intelligence is finally coming so we can deliver 1:1 at scale. So why would you build a product, or a company, without leaning into the advantages of that ecosystem? In his new book, HYPERGROWTH, serial entrepreneur and Drift co-founder/CEO David Cancel shares a modern approach for building products and structuring teams that makes customer communication a central priority. The book tells the story of how Cancel’s customer-driven approach started out as a test with a product team (Performable), transformed an entire organization (HubSpot), and sparked a new movement (Drift). What’s Practical Advice and Frameworks for Becoming Customer-Driven and Growing Your Business Responsive Development (RD): a new approach to building products that adds the customer back into the equation The Burndown Framework: a framework for implementing Responsive Development that’s faster and more flexible than Agile. The Three-Person Team: the customer-driven way to structure engineering teams. Each team consists of a tech lead who manages two other engineers. Getting Rid of Roadmaps: through building a culture of transparency and accountability and working closely with internal customers, you can release product updates more rapidly and iteratively. The Spotlight Framework: a framework for helping you focus on the right parts of customer feedback so you can take the appropriate next steps. The framework breaks feedback down into three main user experience issues, product marketing issues, and positioning issues. Who This Book Is Entrepreneurs, Startup Founders, Product Managers, Product Teams, Marketing Teams … Entire Companies! Every part of your business can benefit from being customer-driven. With the rise of SaaS and the on-demand economy, customer expectations have changed. Customers expect their voices to be heard. They find value in being part of a community, and being part of that journey of creating the product. So stop running your business like we’re still living in the 2000s. It’s time to take a customer-driven approach. Here’s what people are saying about the “David Cancel is one of the best when it comes to building products that customers love. And now he’s sharing his wisdom and writing the book explaining how he does it. This is a must read for any entrepreneur or business owner.” -MARK ROBERGE Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School, Former SVP of Sale and Services at HubSpot ”When it comes to building business software, there’s no one better than David Cancel, and I saw fi

Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship, Nonfiction, Management

80 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 17, 2017

About the author

David Cancel is the Chairman and CEO of Drift, the world's leading conversational marketing and sales platform that helps businesses connect now with the customers who are ready to buy now. After just two years, the company has become one of the fastest growing SaaS companies of all-time and was named to the Forbes Cloud 100, LinkedIn Top 50 Startups, Entrepreneur's Top Company Cultures, Boston Business Journal's Best Places to Work, and SaaS Company of the Year by the NEVCA.

David is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Harvard Business School, a prolific angel investor and the host of The Seeking Wisdom podcast. He is best known for creating hypergrowth companies, products and product teams at companies such as Drift.com, HubSpot, Performable, Ghostery and Compete.

David has been featured by media outlets such as The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, Wired and Fast Company. David has guest lectured on entrepreneurship at Harvard, Harvard Business School, MIT, MIT's Sloan School of Management and other Universities. His popular blog davidcancel.com has been read by 1M+ entrepreneurs, and his Twitter account @dcancel is considered a "Must-Follow" account for entrepreneurs, executives and investors.

Reviews

[Santhosh Guru · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a compilation of David Cancel's thoughts on building product companies from his podcast and blog. I rate it highly because of the contrarian but commonsensical approach proposed and practiced by Drift. For this attribute alone, I recommend this. It is an interesting and a very quick read. Spotlight framework is a very good takeaway on how to act on customers' feedback.

Like Ricardo Semler, Jason Fried and DHH, Dave is also on my watchlist for the original thinking in running companies.

[Mike Costanzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book and am a fan of David's approach to product and business. It was nice to see the high-level overview of his approach to building SaaS product teams with insight into how he evolved the Hubspot org when they acquired his company Performable. Especially his stance on doing away with product roadmaps and letting the engineering function in the product team handle project management, clearly a contrarian view. In David's orgs Product Managers focus on the customer and working with design and marketing to validate ideas with generative and evaluative research ahead of engineering. This is correct IMO but hardly the norm.

While he hates on Agile often this book makes it is clear why. He has a clear stance against overly formalized processes as they distract from customer-centricity. Most Agile frameworks and processes focus on optimizations for a company problem and are not about customer-centric development. Just like his great quote on Roadmaps:

"Roadmaps solve for the company not the customer. What solves for the customer is non-stop testing and a continuous improvement."

The section where he talks about saying "No" to internal requests for specialized infrastructure teams as Hubspot scaled was really fascinating to me. I imagine that was a challenging approach at the time and would still be today.

Concise almost to a fault hence the lack of a full 5-start review. But given the price, length and wisdom packed into this short read it's a highly recommended book for anyone working in or running a SaaS startup.

[Ramesh Mhetre · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit different philosophy on how product & engineering teams can build customer centric culture.

[Ilia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simple and useful book, if you need it. It describes how they set up small, tightly focused teams, and how they worked to get close to the customers needs. Read for inspiration then include the parts that resonate in your own process. Really helped me and my team when I read this, your mileage may vary

[Pratham Sharma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhat nice!!

It is a small book any one can read it. Primarily focuses on customer centricity. However, i don't recommend buying this. I read it for free through kindle unlimited. Soo hope you understand.

[William Amaral · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read

To the point and with a ton of good content. If you are interested in marketing, sales, or general business read this book

[Carlo D'Agnolo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entry-level and very short, but quite interesting!
A free downloadable ebook that you can read in +- 30 minutes.

[Ryan Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Practical and actionable advice

Focusing on the customer leads to a singular focus hence unlocking hypergrowth. This book is a practical field manual to refer back to over time

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good ideas based on vague anecdotes spread very thin

Reads like a long tweet. Hard to argue with "focus on the customer" but very lacking on how to do it well.

[Kush Gupta · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great delight

One if the best books on product thinking. A pragmatic approach to solving real problems.

I'm recommending this to my CXO network.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting short book. I don't agree with some of the things argued (like "no roadmaps" or his overly rigid definitely of Agile), some is common sense, and some is interesting (at least for me, like the Spotlight Framework). I personally wouldn't copy his setup but his process of trying things out and finding what works for you. Interestingly, it's all based on the idea that they're not the customer even though they use the product themselves. Doing user research, basing decisions on data and personas, measuring feature adoption, etc. All great. I would be a little concerned about confirmation bias though if you were to copy this setup. Also, make sure you ask the customer why, why, why and get to the root of their problem. Not just take what they're suggesting at face value.

[Bobby Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short read detailing why David Cancel manages the way he does and how that impacts his companies. I appreciate the different perspective it provides as it pertains to product development for the customer based on direct customer interaction - not just perception of what the business thinks the customer wants or needs. It is a short read and I would like to see it fleshed out to include how companies can overcome typical barriers to implement Responsive Development and Burndown. Maybe in the next book, or more likely iteration of Hypergrowth, that will occur. I think David started this and wanted to get in the hands of his customers so he said "Just ship it!"