Feature prioritization and customers' perceived value with Brad Micklea and Jesse Williams

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Jesse Williams and Brad Micklea, co-founders of Jozu and each with a long history of experience in various open source companies behind them. Even though Jozu is young, there was a lot to learn from these two and their experience in both open source and non-open source businesses. We talked about open source and not open source from CodeEnvy, Red Hat, AWS and Docker.

“It’s very hard to get a sustainable open source project if you don’t have a company behind it paying those developers to work on it.”

Some things we talked about:

• Why it’s important to focus on ‘what people get” instead of ‘what you give people.’ This is a fundamental component of effective product strategy and understanding your value prop: You can’t just talk about about the features you’re delivering; you have to connect that and focus on the value that people get from using the product.
• Jesse talked about the wizard behind the curtain that makes open source projects drive commercial adoption and revenue.
• You must be able to communicate the additional value of the commercial product; otherwise you will run the company into the group.
• Many open source companies get taken hostage by the open source community and end up having trouble monetizing because they make give away value in a way that is not sustainable.
• Users — and especially customers — are often unwilling to commit to a project if they are not convinced that the business behind it is healthy and has a sustainable business model.
• Open source, open standards and open governance — the relationship between the three and why we should all talk more about open standards and open governance in the open source ecosystem.
• The importance of really thinking through why you are open sourcing something, something that many companies don’t think through.

We wrapped up the conversation talking about how difficult it is to figure out which features to prioritize — and that this is a really hard decision for any startup. This is a big part of my shift to focusing on product strategy in my consulting. If you’re an open source startup struggling with product prioritization and strategy, check out my product strategy offering.