Product management lessons from 8 hours of Alex Hormozi

Growing up I was obsessed with shows like The Apprentice, The Profit, and Shark Tank. I loved having an inside look into someone’s business, like peering into their soul. About a month ago, I started watching Alex Hormozi’s YouTube series Building Businesses for Strangers, which is a much more raw, bare bones version of these “business fixer shows”, but the premise is the same: come to the table with your problems, leave with solutions.

Hormozi is mostly known for being an internet business guy, but in the series he talks to all sorts of business owners - restaurateurs, chiropractors, salon owners, to name a few. I watched all 8 hours of his series and realized how much of business strategy maps onto my own slice of business - product management. Here are 5 takeaways from the series for SaaS product managers.

1. Prioritize Time to Value

Hormozi’s common first improvement in the series is shortening the Time to Value (TTV) as much as possible for the customer. Practically, this looks like giving out something free up front for very minimal effort from the customer to hook them, get basic information, and invite a further touchpoint.

In software, this is the onboarding process. TTV is a common marketing term, but isn’t often mapped over to the actual product. Some products require so much up-front information, setup, or series of questions, that the value is hidden behind a maze and moves the value further and further from the sign up button. Product managers should focus on moving the value as close as humanly possible to sign up, delighting the customer as soon as possible to provide value.

2. Aggressive Roadmap Pruning

Most of the business owners on the series come to Hormozi with their main growth issue, plus a new shiny idea they want his opinion on. Nine times out of ten, Hormozi advises ditching the new product line, the new location, or the five extra add-ons and focusing on the core competency of the business. Distractions are the biggest cause of business failure, since they split time, attention, and focus. Especially from small businesses and teams.

For product managers, this looks like ruthlessly prioritizing and then protecting the roadmap. Cutting out features that are distractions from the main driver of value, knowing what that driver is, and sunsetting lines of business that are taking away resources from the main value prop.

3. End Bias

The most memorable part of any interaction is usually the end. For restaurateurs, Hormozi suggested a surprise free dessert for first-time guests. For service businesses, he insisted every appointment end by booking the next one. Both are examples of ending a session with a mix of delight and clear direction.

In SaaS, we often obsess over the “middle” - the complex edge cases of a feature. But we neglect how a user feels when they close the tab. If a user finishes a task and lands on a “success” screen that feels like a dead end, we’ve missed an opportunity. A great product should celebrate the win and immediately suggest the next logical step, similar to how AI chat products suggest follow-up questions to keep the momentum going.

4. Build the Ascension Path

It’s almost always cheaper to expand an existing account than to acquire a new one. Hormozi calls this the “Ascension Path.” It starts with a low-effort, high-value offer that solves a “now” problem, but naturally reveals a “next” problem that requires a higher tier of service. An example of this is the stylist whose initial offer is a “color matching” quiz where the customer is recommended certain colors based on their skin tone. That naturally creates a need - now the customer needs clothes in that color palette. And then the stylist jumps in, offering the service.

For PMs, this is the bridge between a Free tier and a Pro tier. If your free version solves a problem so perfectly that the user never needs anything else, you haven’t built a path, you’ve built a dead end. Your product should solve the immediate pain while making the value of the next tier obvious, much like a membership plan that provides enough value to hook a user but saves the “best” features for those ready to commit further.

5. Institutional Knowledge

A recurring theme in the series is the business owner who acts as a bottleneck. Hormozi’s fix is to templatize the offer so it’s impossible for a new employee to mess up or forget. If the owner has to be in the room for every sale, the business can’t scale.

As PMs, we often fall into the same trap, spending half our day answering “How does this work?” over and over again. If your success and sales teams can’t explain the product without you, you haven’t finished the feature. In order to scale, that knowledge needs to live in rock-solid documentation that acts as a sales enablement tool, turning the PM from a constant troubleshooter into a strategic marketer for their own product.

Keep it Simple

After 5+ years in tech, I sometimes get lost in the bubble where it seems like SaaS businesses are on another planet from regular brick and mortar. But after watching Hormozi analyze, diagnose, and fix a bunch of these businesses, I realized that the heart of every business is the same. Whether it’s a chiropractor or a software company, we’re all asking: How do we get more customers? How do we scale? How do we create repeatable processes?

The best SaaS product managers aren’t just at the forefront of technology - they are also deeply knowledgeable and entrenched in the business. As technology gets better and better, what separates a good PM from a great PM is no longer just running the agile methodology. It’s deeply understanding the business, the customer, and applying these business-agnostic frameworks wherever you are.

Thanks for reading!