Patrick Kayton, CEO, Cognician: How Product Value Proposition Drives a Startup

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In the last financial year at Cognician we doubled our turnover and the size of our team. We have also formed strategic relationships with two major multinationals and we set up an office in San Francisco. Through all this we are still shaping and honing our value proposition.

Any tech startup with a unique and potentially disruptive technology can find it a challenge to articulate a compelling value proposition. The reason is that if you are ahead of the market, you will have to do a lot of work to get noticed by your customers and to convince them to buy. Building a great product is just the start. Understanding how to take it to market and then executing your strategy is equally difficult. And this is just as much the realm of product management as it is of marketing and sales.

However, having a dedicated product manager is a luxury that early stage startups can’t afford. So product management, like everything else, is the responsibility of the founders. This talk is the story of how the product management function has evolved at Cognician and what the next steps are on our journey.

About Patrick:

Patrick has spent the last 15 years putting ideas in peoples heads. He co-founded Bright Sparks with his brother, Barry, to create world-class learning materials, particularly in the area of entrepreneurship education. The pair developed a range of powerful methodologies for learning and behaviour change. Seeking a scaleable way to bring these methods to market, the brothers co-founded Cognician, a platform that provides a superior learning experience, which drives behaviour change. Patrick became and Endeavor entrepreneur in September 2013. He is married to Jill and spends his spare time chasing after his three year old daughter, Ava, and his 10 month old son, Cole.