A brief intro. I transitioned into fractional c-level consulting earlier this year. It’s allowed for some really interesting opportunities.
Part of this story:
- Magic Button Labs as a fractional CPO/CSO contractor
- saasrock.com as a fractional CPO/CMO
Not part of this story:
- RiskSmith.com as a fractional CPO/CMO
- Open to new clients
If the stage setting doesn’t excite you – skip to the epiphany.
Magic Button Labs
I’ve been helping Magic Button Labs on two fronts:
- a client engagement
- building out their product management framework & methodology (one of the reasons I’ve been writing less about product management methodologies)
It is a rigorous & structured framework that is extremely well suited to existing companies who need to map strategy to execution.
While working on both fronts simultaneously, I tried to help my first client through Magic Button Labs understand the framework. I skipped traditional product management tools and started with figma. It was incredibly freeing for the early strategy work. The executives didn’t need to have multiple links for documentation & for the individual items (epics, stories, etc). It was all available in one view.
Every time we made changes… oh vei… it was a lot of work to reflow, but it moved the project along extremely fast. After the initial strategy work was completed, we were able to transfer everything into JIRA with a nested visibility according to Magic Button Labs proprietary implementation.
saasrock
I’ve been helping saasrock & it’s founder Alexandro create a saas-building-framework. When I first met him, he was building a number of saas boiler frameworks. Not only was he duplicating his effort with multiple different technology stacks, but he wasn’t differentiating himself from the other saas boiler kits. He needed to focus.
The first thing we did is pick a direction of what he wanted to build:
- a saas framework that included that was batteries included
- using remix (a new react.js framework) that is frankly amazing
The second thing we had to do was pick what “batteries included” meant. For the purposes of this conversation we’ll gloss over CRM, helpedesk, onboarding… and the solutions all saas companies need to build a saas and talk about features that let you build a saas itself.
- entity builder (database tables)
- entity view builder
These are table stakes. There are many solutions that let you do this well for yourself without being able to turn it into a saas. Do you need easy to use & grok internal tools? Go try notion it’s quite literally awesome.
An epiphany. Relationship-based view building
I was personally struggling with having a visual model to explain relationships while still capturing rich data necessary for each layer (multiple data points). I had to do a lot of rework.
I was explaining this pain to a few people when I remembered a writing tool I had tried years ago: gingkowriter.com.
Exploring multi-entity relationship views with gingkowriter
Although my use case for visualizing the data relationship between entities (database tables) is specific to product management, that schema is still in development.
Example: I decided to model out a simple example using a simple CRM schema.
I came to realize that these types of views are huge enablers of visibility and could be very effectively to run meetings and send reports. I do believe that eventually we could build KPI trees.
This has insane potential. What does having a dynamically built data hierarchy view builder
NEED:
- ability to select entities (database tables)
- ability to select entity fields that identify relationship
- ability to configure the “card” for each kanban lane (each entity may have different fields and different priorities)
- ability to click on a card to open the original entity object page (or panel or modal)
- security
NICE TO HAVE:
- lane level summaries
- summarize revenue in opportunity lane (which was stupidly missed in my image)
- summarize revenue of selected account’s opportunities
- ability to configure different versions of the cards (compact, normal, full)
- ability to chat or complete todos on the cards
- filters
Exploring entity self-referential entity relationship views with gingkowriter
After having the ah-ha moment about building multi-entity relationship views – it took less than a week to realize we were really just discussing building an infrastructure to view relationships and there were different types of relationships available.
Example: an org chart. In the org chart employees report to other employees. This relationship uses a field on an entity to build the view (instead of mapping a field from one entity to another entity it references itself). Note: in this example cards only need to be configured one-time.
Moving a whole industry forward?
As part of my regularly scheduled calls with Alexandro I broached the subject of building a builder for relationship views. I reviewed the term I coined with him for “hierarchical kanban.” Although the new kanban approach is the first in the list – view builders are powerful because they enable to use the same data structures and render them in different ways. Here are some examples:
hierarchical view builders coming to saasrock
I reviewed this idea with Alexandro and he is going to add it to saasrock.
I beg the other platforms to steal this idea
I believe this idea has merit. I think saasrock is doing something special with its approach to building an integrated solution for building & launching saas companies. But, saasrock will not replace notion, airtable, clickup, and more for building tools inside of companies.
Also, I’d love for notion to take this idea and run with it – because frankly they’d help push this concept further than Alexandro & I could on our own.