In recent years, product discovery has become a growing priority for high-performing product teams. Here's how to get started.
In 2019, I decided to write a book to help new and aspiring product managers land a PM job and launch their careers. My Book, Principles of Product Management, is Now Available!
I first heard of Elium, formerly known as Knowledge Plaza, in 2011. I was attending a very small startup event where Gregory Culpin presented the company and its market vision.
Revealing the mystery behind the Apple Mail App and why the small app has a wider role to play in Apple's wider privacy-first strategy and fight for the market
A full immersion into Netflix's changing strategy as the market landscape for streaming becomes saturated.
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” — Jeff Bezos
Start-ups are super exciting, fun and challenging. You have a notch above of all these when you join as a product leader/manager in start-ups where the product offering is unique yet interesting, the potential is high but the road ahead is less travelled and undiscovered.
Learn how to test hypotheses and create prototypes and MVPs to ensure the success of your product. Find out how methods like RAT and MVP can help product manage
Your product roadmapping is a viable means to depict how this product is prone to develop, to adjust the stakeholders, and to procure a money related arrangement for this product. In any case, making a powerful guide is difficult, especially in agile development, where changes happen as often as possible and often out of the blue. In this way, there are things never to overlook while making your roadmap and sprint backlog. Remembering them will help you in making an intense agile product using scrum sprint backlog, the roadmap template and other powerful product management tools.
Product management is a specialized role with an intelligent blend of business, tech and user experience. A product manager is mostly tasked with the duty of successfully managing the development of a product from start to launch, above other tasks.
I did a Twitter poll to see what people think is the best approach to developing new products/services. The poll has been featured among people with startup or entrepreneurial interests. After looking at the results, I was surprised.
In an ideal world, the goal of any business starting up is to make money. In most cases, the profitability of a product is closely tied to how you as a product manager choose to price your product. Apart from building a product that provides real value to its customers, profitable monetization is the second most important aspect of running a successful business.
Some of us in product take it for granted that a product-led approach is the way to operate. However, all too often our stakeholders – sales, marketing, our boss’s boss, even our own team – may need some convincing.
Believe most of us are already aware of what is expected of a Product Manager profile in any internet company, starting from being a mini CEO of the product to be the interface between business, UX & technology. Here in addition to those common attributes of a PM profile I am going to point out few not so common traits but important qualities a Product Manager should possess.
Entering your first towards an MVP (minimum viable product) can cause confusion if you focus on outcomes as planned. Plan to learn with the trip instead.
We were in college when we decided to start a company. At that time, it didn’t matter what type of company.
A Startup Model for Corporate Innovation
The global product development services industry was close to $8 billion in 2020.
I am developing a product with data privacy as the highest priority. It is hard (and maybe costly too).
With the sudden outburst of COVID-19, while most companies tanked, a few became viral and shot to fame. As a Product Manager, whenever I see yet another product in the market facilitating a service / use case that already is being fulfilled, I feel this unquenchable thirst to find out why it is doing well.
Tech products, whether digital features, products, or services, need to achieve product-market fit if they have any hope of succeeding.
Software development takes time and effort and requires patience, but if it’s taking too long it can hurt the business. That’s why it’s important to always consider what you can do to improve your software development productivity.
What your customer will remember is how they felt while using the product, not how unique/different it was.
Product marketing function varies significantly from company to company and it sometimes even means different things at the same organization.
Many tech businesses rely on a mix of process and platitudes to define how they work. Instead, they should focus on the tactics that inform their processes.
How do you build something that users really want? Perhaps you could assemble a few and ask for them to make it themselves!
The first crypto fashion week just happened, making way for a new wave of fashion but without the materiality.
The transition from sales-led to product-led growth model: What are the benefits and challenges of the product-led growth model.
Last Thursday, I was lucky to interview Warren Schirtzinger during a live webinar, one of the co-creators of the “Chasm” framework in the 80s, later polished and popularized by Geoffrey Moore in the book “Crossing the Chasm”.
Engineers often complain about product strategy, but this post goes through why it is so hard and how to avoid common pitfalls.
A product team is the backbone of any company with a digital offering. They're responsible for constructing goods or a service that not only provides value to users but is also a reflection of the organization they work for. Product teams spin many plates at once, spanning duties from product management, product marketing, user experience, and product analytics. In the below article, we talk through the 4 characteristics that make up a high-performing product team.
However educated you may think you are, you aren’t doing it enough.
Fintech startups have become undeniably attractive in the last few years, receiving a lot of attention from media outlets and VCs. I spoke with Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury, to understand the vision for his new company that aims to define the future of banking for startups.
There is always that new product manager who is wondering what the next 3 months will look like. The successes, learnings, adaptations, expectations, and the list goes on and on.
Key takeaways from transforming a monolithic team into three autonomous squads and much more.
A 5 step framework for strategic storytelling and how to position product.
Here, I will introduce you to different categories of success metrics and how are they used in a broader sense.
Root Cause Analysis for Managers
We’re working on a more detailed follow up to the high-level research we did into APIs and the ASX100. As part of the follow-up, I’m looking into the APIs offered by ASX100 companies and, for no scientific reason, chose to start with an analysis of NAB’s developer portal.
Product managers are able to help in tech debt closing. Is it myth or reality? In the article, we'll discover what it may look like under the hood.
Few years ago, I consulted for a small Rx delivery startup in HongKong where I focused on strategy, go-to-market and built out their product direction from the
Getting number one spot on Product Hunt gives your product unprecedented exposure and legitimizes your release as one worth watching.
Product Marketing is the art and science of bringing a product to the right market and establishing a sustainable positioning for the product.
Many teams and organisations jump into build mode too early. Then they build something that customers reject, they miss the mark, or they need extra budget to get it there. When you suggest a Product Discovery as a way to help get better results it gets rejected. This article is a way to answer the question: “Why do Product Discovery?”
The phone balanced high-end quality with a mid-range price tag, offering a top of the range smartphone on the level of a flagship Samsung Galaxy for half the price. When word got out — through social media and tech sites who marvelled at the quality to price ratio — consumer interest spiked.
Positioning is one of the most important steps after entrepreneurs finish their market, customer and competitive analysis. Knowing competitors plus their positioning, the target audience, the market trends along with the problems and challenges of the customers it becomes easier to position the product competitively in terms of value, audience and price.
Find here answers to the key questions often asked by novice entrepreneurs and product developers. The bare truth about entrepreneurship, a bitter taste of failures, the sweetness of triumphs, and first-hand experience - everything is blended here into a cocktail of product design and development insights.
I no longer assume I know what someone actually does when they say they are a Product Manager. This year, I had a chance to have over 40 or so 1:1s with folks from outside of work in different stages of their product management journey. No two roles were the same. I distilled our conversations into one picture in an attempt to put a unifying model to the various flavors of product management discipline out there.
The JTBD framework introduced me to the idea that customers don’t “buy” products. Instead they “hire” products or services to help them overcome an obstacle and better their lives. Products that deliver on this promise of upgrading the customers’ lives are loved whereas the ones failing to do so are dumped.
Natasha from hackernoon.com asks Product Strategist Dani Laity to unpack the sustainable tech product strategies and monetization models powering Aurora Sustainability—2020 Noonie Nominee in for Best Use of Tech for Good in hackernoon.com’s annual internet awards! 🚀
Many new products get launched in the market every day. But not every product is a hit.
We see hard-working product teams struggling all the time, even under the best of conditions. Often, it’s not due to a deficiency or lack of skill within the team. Rather, the team has fallen into one—or more—of the most common dysfunctions in product management.
A Proof of Concept (POC) is a small exercise to test the product idea or assumption. The main purpose of developing a POC is to demonstrate the functionality and to verify a certain concept or theory that can be achieved in development.
If building products is hard, positioning your product is harder. No matter what you build and sell, how you position your product dictates what you do. How you prioritize, marketing campaigns, sales strategy, it all changes based on how your product is positioned.
I’ve been asked many times what is product management in a tech startup and how the job differs from product management at a larger company with a more mature product.
PM is not just a very important person from the C-suite. They play a crucial role in the live cycle of any product of the company and they are really supposed to wear suits, but they don’t. Because product managers are responsible not just for the technical side of the product, but of its heart and soul. The main difference of PM from any management position is the necessity to be involved in the product creation directly. The manager is not about producing, but about understanding the techniques and showing the direction for all the teams, as the PM should have the final image of the product.
By the time I entered the bar on that rainy spring afternoon, Justin had already started on his cocktail. It had been a few months since I saw him last; after his product design firm ended their work with my previous healthcare technology employer, he had taken on some new projects and
it was tough to find time to connect. I had recently left that employer myself to take on a new job that ticked all the boxes- pay raise, prestigious company, work from home, great boss. Plenty of changes to catch up on.
“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible,” ― Don Norman
No one will buy your product if they can’t find it. Making your products visible to people who need your offering is a key aspect of selling to online buyers.
In “Alice in Wonderland” we are invited to escape reality by tumbling into a whimsical world of nonsense. I found in this story a good analogy for PMs.
When I joined a copywriting agency, the first thing we did was learn how to use trigger words in our copy. One of my first projects was writing a product description for a sex toy. I had to write a copy that encouraged the target audience to buy “sex toys for couples.”
Defining Product Goals and Metrics for Product Managers.
Solving Product Execution Problems and Cases for PM interviews.
While companies become increasingly customer-centric, PMs are still sitting in a gold mine of underused customer knowledge. This is how can we change that.
The faster you can develop a product, the sooner it gets to market and the more sales you make. Your brand improves its market position and credibility by beating competitors to the punch.
There is a recurrent thread going on in tech circles that contrasts 1) the philosophical approach of companies that have adopted the lean startup practice of rapid customer development cycles, and pivoting with your learnings, vs 2) companies that are thesis-driven, have a big mission and are relentless in pursuing it, bending reality to their will — using examples of product visionaries like Jobs, Gates and Musk.
Welcome to the first edition of Product Stories. The first product that I have chosen is Reddit — a company that thousands of startups have tried to emulate but always failed to do so. Let’s look at why that is and what’s so special about Reddit.
Fintech startups have become undeniably attractive in the last few years, receiving a lot of attention from media outlets and VCs. I spoke with Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury, to understand the vision for his new company that aims to define the future of banking for startups.
In the early stages of startup development, teams run the risk of advancing too quickly as they obtain limited data about their early customers.
I am a Stripe fanboy. Back in 2014, I remember being mighty impressed at the ease with which we were able to implement a seemingly complicated thing - the billing infrastructure at Zinrelo - using Stripe. Right from the discovery to on-boarding, the API docs to the error messages, everything with Stripe was a cakewalk. And not a single time did we have to interact with a human being at Stripe’s end. After a couple of years, I had a similar experience with another product - Intercom. Integrating Intercom and the whole product experience in general was exceedingly simple requiring no human interaction.
Why do companies bundle products and services? A case study on Apple
The unique selling proposition, or USP, for any product, must inspire a potential customer to take action.
In this modern era where technological revolution is at its pinnacle, no business can afford to serve its customers without understanding their likes and dislikes, their preferences, and their innate feelings. Organizations today accept this fact openly: being data-driven top of the priority list; understanding the value they can draw out of storing, processing and analysing their customer data.
Product management has seen a lot of takers in the last few years. This field is so varied and versatile that putting bounds to it is a daunting task. Nevertheless, based on my experience and knowledge gained from the circles of product community; I have listed down different fundamental elements of product management.
I recently read The Pragmatic Programmer — By Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas. The book introduced me to the Stone Soup story which is as follows.
What can testers do for marketers? And how does this unusual alliance help business?
If you Google anything around "product - market fit", you're going to find hundreds of articles saying why this is so important for startups and software companies. Without it, the experts claim, you can't scale your idea. Won't have a viable company. But there isn't much on how to implement this theory.
Over the last twenty years, Saas and Cloud have been the two emerging technology sectors.
How Jira, Hygger, Asana, and Others Surprised Their Users in 2019?
Historically, management consulting companies have relied primarily on human capital to solve complex business challenges of their clients.
This post will cover Denis’ workflow from planning to execution around the Preferences project as well as his experience working with the Courier team.
If you still don’t know what Product Hunt is and why you should do your launch on this platform, I suggest you read this article, this is the official Product Hunt post, a must read.
Key biases, heuristics and cognitive effects that can be used for designing products.
Find out what you need to do as a co-founder during product development when you have little to do but still need to contribute to the success of the startup.
Clayton Christensen is one of the greatest business minds of our time. His recent passing caused me to reflect on all I learned from him. His life was dedicated to his family, his faith, and the theories he taught. He personified servant leadership.
In the last post we looked at what strategy is and the false contradiction between planning for strategy and letting your product emerge through rapid experimentation and fast feedback loops, which often combine and compound in unforeseen ways. We talked at how writing it down can help you clarify your future thinking and crystallize your product definition and the strategy that underlies it.
Product information management (PIM) software is necessary for eCommerce businesses to manage their customer-facing product strategy.
