Snapshot. Talisman started broad: a SaaS-management platform spanning employee onboarding, access provisioning, offboarding, security, and spend. I mapped the whole opportunity up front, then we shipped the simplest slice, spend visibility, to learn what users actually cared about. They cared about seeing their spend, not provisioning access. I made the call to narrow the entire company onto spend. That focus became the expense product, and it saved us from building costly integrations into every tool we would have needed for provisioning.
The opportunity
When we got into Techstars in 2022, Talisman was a broad idea: help companies manage all of their software. Onboard employees and provision their tools, control who has access to what, offboard cleanly, stay secure, and see spend. All of those are real jobs. None of them was an obvious place to start. The trap with a broad platform is that you build a little of everything and nothing well, and you run out of money before any one thing is good.
What I did, and why
I mapped the whole opportunity before building anything. I ran a Jobs-to-be-Done exercise across the entire space: every job a company might have, what they would feel if it were solved, what they did instead today (their real alternatives), and what Talisman could build for each. It forced the question of which job actually mattered most, rather than starting from the feature we were most excited about.
We shipped the easiest slice first, to learn, not to launch. Access and provisioning would have required deep integrations into every tool a company used, which is slow and expensive to build. Spend visibility was the simplest thing to get into real users’ hands. So that is what we built first.
I followed the signal instead of the original vision. Once it was in front of users, the feedback was consistent: they cared far less about managing and provisioning access. They wanted to see their spend. So I made the call to narrow the whole company onto spend rather than keep chasing the broad platform.
That decision protected our runway. Focusing on spend meant we did not have to build and maintain integrations into every tool just to provision access, a large, costly effort that users were actively telling us they did not want. We put that money and time into the one thing people cared about.
Outcome
The spend focus became Talisman’s expense product, the same product we later revamped and relaunched to #1 SaaS Product of the Week on Product Hunt, and the foundation the accountant product was eventually built on. Narrowing early is the reason there was a focused product to build, fund, and launch at all rather than a thin platform spread across five jobs.
The rest of the portfolio is what happened after this call: see Subscription activation and Accountant transaction workflow. I also wrote up the deeper lesson as an essay, Find the wedge, then narrow it again.
Artifact
The Jobs-to-be-Done map I built in 2022 to scope the opportunity: the jobs, the feelings behind them, the alternatives users already had, and what Talisman could build for each. The whole company narrowed out of this exercise.
Reflection
This exercise was the best intro to product management I could have had. Empathy with the user is the trait I think is most important in this field. Without user empathy, you can never build a truly great product.