Kill the HiPPO
Follow our journey creating, publishing and marketing Kill the HiPPO.
Kill the HiPPO is now available to purchase in either Kindle or print format on:
- amazon.com
- amazon.co.uk
- amazon.com.au
- amazon.es
- and all the other regional amazon sites - just search for "Kill the HiPPO"
"HiPPO" is an acronym from product management: "Highest Paid Person's Opinion."
The "HiPPO" phenomenon is the tendency for team members to defer to the opinion of higher-paid or higher-ranking colleagues.
If a product team doesn't have a system for feature prioritization, then the "HiPPO" bias drives the default approach.
The "HiPPO" approach is usually mocked, but it does have its place. For new and young products, it's often as good an approach as any other for working out what to build next. In this case, the HiPPO is the founder, and the founder is typically building the product with an intimate knowledge of the product domain. If they are doing things intelligently, they are in frequent contact with customers, hearing first-hand what's missing from the product and what needs to be added urgently.
But there comes a time when the "HiPPO" approach is no longer the best way to decide what to build next.
And that's when it's time to kill the "HiPPO." But only metaphorically, of course.
This book shows how feature prioritization happens in small, bootstrapped software companies.
Choosing the right features to build in our software products is one of the most important things we do as founders. But it's also really hard.
A lot of existing advice is biased towards teams in large organizations, often with VC funding. But many of us are creating software in small bootstrapped teams. We are operating under a completely different set of constraints. Basically, we have less of everything, less data, less time, less resources, less people, and yet we still need to make these critical decisions.
So we interviewed several bootstrapped software companies to find out how these critical decisions are made. We asked the founder and other senior team members at each company how they prioritize new features, and how that process has changed over time.
The companies we collected these stories from are bootstrapped, stable, well-run, mature, and profitable, each with about 10 to 35 employees.
We then used each interview to write an illuminating chapter with that company's story, offering novel and helpful ways you can also use to decide what features your company should build next.