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What does StealthDog Labs do?

Business is complicated. It’s hard to run an organization especially when the customer is in charge. That’s just the reality and it’s a welcomed future.

 I picked the things that I understand the most but I did not shy away from what is difficult. These are things that if done well enough, your business can reach Product-Market Fit, and better yet, it can keep cycling and avoid disruptive innovation happening to you. 

One thing I wanted to do is have some type of software that removes as much inconsistency bias and power away from things that are not right.

Example: it’s not right to sell something to people that they don’t want.  there once was a day when this is possible with cheap media but you’re not solving long-term what people like and they’re likely to trash talk your company anyway.  Don’t do temporary things.

 That’s why all of this is technology-driven. If you have the chops, it’s a bunch of data files.   you’re not going to need me or anybody else to ingest these files into your Market work and Product. If you need help setting up how to use the data files, we are here. But we’re not consultants.  

Here is a basic breakdown of what we do at stealth dog labs and the technical module connected to the work effort.

Why do people buy and how they decide

In the Product-Market Fit world, this is called the customers’ underserved needs.  It took a while but I found a way to use language psychology and computational linguistics to find the root cause of decision making. My proof point is dialing it back into CRM, connecting to revenue and profit. You don’t have to go that far but it does to prove which underserved needs are driving revenue and profit. There might be some other bits of data along the way. What kind of cars they drive and what else is in their life.  Bottom line; Traits are causal to revenue and profit,  there is a ton of other things that are coming along for the ride that helps. You just have to organize it in such a way so that it can be predictive and prescriptive for your organization.

What are the customers unmet needs?

Using Computational Linguistics and a market scorecard survey module, you can figure out what people want and make sure that you don’t average all these different types of people together. It’s your best chance at building resource allocation for Market efforts. 

The difference between this module and the one before it is the market scorecard. Just because you have a bunch of data does not mean much. If you don’t have the budget to put it to use, it’s a big waste of time. This module helps you prepare for ingesting data and how to best utilize it. Sometimes organizations are just not ready. If you are in the hindsight data state, you just don’t flip a switch and turn into a predictive company.

I would rather have a better process in the beginning so you’re not feeding junk to product people.   that’s easy to say but that’s what the market scorecard survey does. It helps you prepare.

A lot of times we see organizations not organized in a way that best serves the customer. There’s so much to keep track of and it’s best to have a series of things done well by your entire team.   When everybody is educated and aligned on best practices, as best possible, good things happen.  Having a scorecard is something of a learning machine. If you give enough people access to it, you will have created a scoring mechanism across departments, allowing people to focus on what’s most important to the organization and more important, to the customers.  The concepts that are in the market scorecard are things that took me a lifetime to learn. The ability to organize it only came to me because I put the time and effort into writing it all down. 

These are not just textbook assignments or something you do one time. The idea is to learn this material overtime and improve as a team. Team learning will work when leadership is bought into being a successful company. if you’re grading yourself as well as your entire team, across departments, over time you will see changes in the performance of the organization according to how well they’re self-educating. 

What is the value proposition to meet the unmet needs?

We developed a product scorecard, similar to a Market scorecard. All of the questions are Product related. Does the team know what they should be handed? Do they have an expectation of what to do with the information they’re given from the Market efforts?    it’s the same bit about self-educating and constantly score carding the efforts of yourself, your team, your department an entire organization.

How should organizations adapt to customer needs?

Unfortunately to best answer this question, you need the next question. How do you allocate resources to adapt to customer needs? Once that’s done properly, there is a set of organized tools around the topic of innovation, disruptive innovation, creating a framework that allows you to manage innovation. Things like ‘change management’ with a business operating scorecard help keep track of changes within the organizations without overwhelming them with too much to do. The last thing you need to do is install something that is overbearing and overburdening.

You’re going to get Innovation right  – because you are an innovative company.  The tragedy is when innovation budgets get slashed in favor of the wrong type of growth mechanisms. Sometimes I sit back and think what I’m really doing is helping people allocate resources correctly. Having all of this data and predictive capabilities allows for a source of Truth to argue for putting efforts in the right places.  For example, if you haven’t crossed the chasm and you’re dumping money into marketing, you’re short-circuiting what product needs to cross the chasm. that feels dreadfully wrong.

 How do you connect all of the above together?

In summary, all of these Scorecards and software took months of research and work to complete.  I think it took a lifetime of experience observing and doing things right and wrong.   

An important part of the process for me was finding what others think. I focused on 74 experts in the field of Product-Market Fit.  Let me say that there are people that understand the topic but their expertise might be in a different area.  These are very successful people. I downloaded hundreds of thousands of words and organize them into themes.  These experts repeated themselves in many areas. Where they put the most passion came down to 565 topics.

I broke down the 565 topics down into three modules –  Market, Product and Business Operating System scorecard.  I noticed certain experts emphasize Market while others focus on Product. All of them touch upon how to glue it together but there was no congruent, one-size-fits-all expert.   I was not in the mood to just write down a bunch of ideas I wanted to see this as something that could be put into operations. My idea was to use this for the next company I join or attempt to do this as a software model.

For example, there are a lot of consultants that talk about business operating systems for large organizations but there’s not a lot of material available for growth organizations. I wanted to create something that would help educate organizations on the three areas of business necessary to reach Product-Market Fit and include a Business Operating System to help manage at all.   

We have a lot of linguistic-based, massive datasets that create quantified views of what customers want – The underserved needs you need to understand to build a product people care about. We also have Scorecards that help you judge where you are in the entire process. It’s a pretty simple system that allows you to grade yourself over time. If you don’t have time to grab the bull by the horns were happy to help. We’re not consultants but we do have a passion for seeing great products reach the market.