Caura Empowered Their Team to Move Faster
Caura Worked With Nick Black to Build Confidence and Make Faster Decisions
About Caura
Caura is a mobility app founded by Sai Lakshmi, Bhavin Kotecha and Shaun Foce. Sai’s last startup, Echo, was acquired by Lloyd’s Pharmacy. Sai and Bhavin built a world-class team at Caura and had a clear vision for their next big hit.
So why did the all-star team choose to work with Nick to build out their product strategy?
Empower their team and move faster
I wanted to give my team a framework they could use to make day-to-day decisions
Sai Lakshmi, CEO
Founder and CEO Sai has founded, scaled and exited startups before. He knew that he needed to build a team of capable, high-calibre team players who were empowered to make decisions. Sai told me, “I wanted to give my team a framework they could use to make day-to-day decisions without my direct involvement, giving me more time to focus on the big picture of where we were going”.
Their problem
We kept considering different things, having a lot of conversations, but not making decisions
Annika Schmid, Product Manager
Caura product manager, Annika Schmid, was responsible for day-to-day backlog prioritisation. Annika told me, “We wanted to have a grounded way of making decisions. Without a good decision-making system, you tend to make decisions week-to-week, day-to-day. We kept considering different things, having a lot of conversations, but not making decisions”.
When they started working with Nick, the Caura team were trying to make progress with:
- Empowering their engineering team to make fast day-to-day decisions
- Aligning and motivating the team behind a shared vision of their end goal
- Ensuring new engineering staff could become quickly productive
Choosing Nick meant moving fast
For the Caura team, working with Nick was all about time. The team worked with Nick through 20 hours of workshops and coaching sessions, and another 20 hours of their own work to build their strategy.
So why did an experienced, super talented team work with Nick
First, they knew they’d get it right first time, with no trial and error.
“When you work with Nick, you’re buying the confidence that it’s going to work.”
Sai Lakshmi, CEO
Next, they new they’d get the best frameworks and the best facilitation.
“I was a first-time product manager, the founders had built companies before but didn’t have loads of recent, hands-on experience running product organisations. We knew exactly what we wanted to do, but we weren’t sure if we were making the best decisions, using the best frameworks, moving as fast as we could.”
Annika Schmid, Product Manager
The result was skipping months of trial and error.
“We could have done it ourselves, but working with Nick let us skip months of trial and error.”
Bhavin Kotecha, Financial Director
The Outcome
Nick worked with Caura in summer 2021. By summer 2022 they were still using the north star metrics, value propositions, jobs to be done and other frameworks that Nick introduced them to.
Working with Nick has let Caura set the right goals and metrics, so they can move faster, with greater confidence.
The right goals and metrics
“I use Nick’s frameworks to explain our customers’ job to be done and our north star metric. We’ve been using the North Star metric we identified with Nick today, 12 months later as the basis for our planning every quarter.”
Move Faster
More Confidence in the team
“We don’t spend time thinking about what method is best, we spend the time thinking about what we need to do to delight our customers”
“We have more clarity, I have more confidence in my work and my work style than ever before.”
Annika Schmid, Product Manager
How we did it
Nick’s been a founder and chief product officer since 2005. Over the last 17 years he’s developed a framework that lets founders and leaders quickly and accurately build their product strategy - the blueprint for their product-led growth.
Clear Goals
With the Caura team, we started by getting clear on their company goals and the sequence in which they needed to hit them. This let’s every focus on the next hill to climb.
North Star Metric
The north star metric tells you how your customer will behave if they love your product. Having a clear north star helped empower Caura’s engineering team to make day to day decisions, which let their founders focus on the big picture.
Focus on things we control
Clearly identifying goals and tasks that were under the team’s control and those that were not helped Caura focus their efforts.
“that one thought alone has stopped us exploring things that wouldn’t have made sense - really valuable”.
Jobs to Be Done and Value Prop
Day to day decisions should be grounded in a view of the overall objectives of the company, its north star metric and the needs of its users. Working with Nick the Caura team used jobs to be done to develop a crystal clear value proposition.
Virtual Workshops
The Caura team worked with Nick through Zoom, using Miro boards to build out their strategy.
Annika Schmid, Product Manager
“After each session, we had actionable pieces of strategy and metrics that we could work on after each session.”
Nick Black helped Caura move faster, empower their team to make decisions with confidence and gave the founders more time to focus on the big picture.