Lean AI

Chapter 6. Build Versus Buy

All startup growth teams are tasked with trying to acquire more new customers and growing revenues while consuming the least amount of resources. The benefit of being a startup today is that there are more robust off-the-shelf SaaS growth stack tools available to leverage to help successfully acquire, engage, retain, and monetize customers.

All startups will face the same dilemma around whether to build or buy an intelligent machine. This is an important decision for businesses of all sizes, but especially startups because they are by definition so very resource constrained. Making the wrong decision could have severe consequences to the long-term success—or even viability—of the business.

The first step is for the growth team to work with their product team to create a product requirements document—commonly referred to as a PRD—that clearly articulates all the requirements and provides a strong business case for their desire to integrate an “intelligent machine” into the product road map. This is an important document because it allows people to understand what the product should do and win internal support for the project to be prioritized. Here is a list of the typical components to include in your PRD:

• Purpose and scope of the project from a business and technical perspective

• Projected assumptions on the key metrics of the business (e.g., 10% lift in ROI)

• Typical use cases on how this would help the growth team

• Constraints (budget, time, ...