Has Visual Design Fallen Flat?
It was a time of great change in the world of visual design: foreshadowed by Microsoft’s aggressively modernist Metro style, popularized and polarized by the release of iOS 7, and perhaps most fully...
View Article2015 Product Management Insights report: 3 trends shaping the future of the...
What does it take to be successful a product manager? What exactly do product managers do on a daily basis? What are the latest trends and best practices throughout the product lifecycle?To get answers...
View ArticleLessons learned from scaling a product team
There’s been lots written about how Internet business should build software, from books like The Lean Start-Up, and posts from Google Ventures, but not many examples where startups open up their...
View ArticleExperimenting with Product, Price and Market
Every startup has to experiment with product, price and market to find the right combination that allows them to scale and win. But if you find yourself experimenting with all three at the same time,...
View ArticleProduct Debt
If you’ve spent any amount of time around developers you should be familiar with the term technical debt. Technical debt comes from hacking things together quickly and moving on. It accumulates over...
View ArticleMaking sense of customer feedback
Recently we told you there are some customer opinions you shouldn’t listen to. But after you’ve weeded out the aspirational, the hypothetical and the third party statements, what customer feedback...
View Article4 Ways to Test Your Product In the Wild
These days, you can test more user experiences than ever before. Here at UserTesting, we recently launched our new mobile recording technology, which makes it possible to test user experiences in...
View ArticleInvisible design: why is less more?
Have you ever been charged down by several tons of wild rhino? I’m guessing the answer is no, so let me share what it’s like. A couple of years ago I was trekking in a remote part of Nepal. Our small...
View ArticleHow to Master The Discipline of Product Management (Not the job of Product...
This Evergreen collection of wisdom is not about being a product manager. It is about how to manage a product. How to craft something of value for customers and the artful decision-making required to...
View ArticleThe Ultimate Guide To Price Strategy
Could the advice you’ve been told about structuring your prices or priced your products hurt your overall sales? In this post, I’m going to show you the price-structuring tactics and strategies anyone...
View ArticleHiring Your First Product Manager
As a technical or product-focused CEO/founder of a growing company, a challenge one eventually faces is making that first product manager hire. Like most founders, there’s a good chance that you’re...
View ArticleEverything We Wish We’d Known About Building Data Products
“What could we say that would help you avoid all of the pain, the headaches, the late nights that we had to endure as systems failed and data got corrupted?” Related Article The Anatomy of the Perfect...
View ArticleThe Lean Roadmap
There are so many features you may want to add to your product, but there never seems to be enough time, am I right? Product management for startups is still an open issue. Why is that? There are at...
View ArticleWhy ‘Build, Measure, Learn’ isn’t just throwing things against the wall to...
I am always surprised when critics complain that the Lean Startup’s Build, Measure, Learn approach is nothing more than “throwing incomplete products out of the building to see if they work.”...
View ArticleThe Lean Roadmap
There are so many features you may want to add to your product, but there never seems to be enough time, am I right? Product management for startups is still an open issue. Why is that? There are at...
View ArticleWhy ‘mobile first’ may already be outdated
For a number of years now, we’ve all been hit over the head time and again with “mobile first” and “mobile only”. Those of us building software since before the iPhone have hacked our brains, our...
View ArticleProduct/Market Fit: What it really means, How to Measure it, and Where to...
Because it’s such a new concept, there are a few overlapping definitions of Product-Market Fit. We should start with the definition from Marc Andreesen, who originally coined ‘Product/Market Fit’ in...
View ArticleWhy Our Startup Built An Audience Before Our Product
That’s a question you’ll hear a lot when pitching an idea for a startup, and it’s one that you better have an answer to. But with so many marketing channels available, where do you even begin? The...
View ArticleThe Next Feature Fallacy: The fallacy that the next new feature will suddenly...
A few weeks ago, I read this tweet, and found myself nodding my head in vigorous agreement. For people who love to build product, when something’s not working, it’s tempting to simply build more...
View ArticleThe cycle of UX design
The first time I caught myself thinking about UX design was when I started reading the book called “The design of everyday things” by Donaly Norman. It made me realise, that it is not enough to have...
View Article43 lessons growing from $0 to $1+ million in revenue, twice
I realized the other day that we’ve grown from $0 to $1 million with two separate products HelloSign and HelloFax. This happened a long time ago, but I was recently reflecting on the lessons.I found a...
View ArticleThis is the Product Death Cycle. Why it happens, and how to break out of it
The hardest part of any new product launch is the beginning, when it’s not quite working, and you’re iterating and molding the experience to fix it. It may be the hardest phase, but it’s also the most...
View ArticleLessons from the front lines: building Fetchnotes
A couple months ago, I announced the acquisition of Fetchnotes, a startup I took from ENGR 490 at the University of Michigan through Techstars in Boston. Like any startup experience, there were a lot...
View Article16 product things I learned at Imgur
Every interface can be made simpler. One useful technique is to have a separate meeting focused just on cutting and simplifying. You can also appoint an individual ‘cutter’ to take this role outside of...
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Communicating Your Vision vs. Your Product
Here’s a classical mistake I’m seeing with some early startups that have a compelling vision, during the time when they come out with the first iterations of their product. They try to blurt out their...
View ArticlePodcast: Braden Kowitz talks design and startups
Braden Kowitz is a self-described product designer, prototyper, and storyteller. Currently a Design Partner at Google Ventures, he advises startups on UX design and product development. Before joining...
View ArticleDesign is non-negotiable, especially for startups
In the early-stages of startup life, it’s easy for design to seem like a luxury reserved for the handful of accomplished companies that have the time and money to pay for it. But design is arguably...
View Article4 Design Skills Every Product Manager Should Have
The importance of design is a common refrain these days in the tech industry — to the point of almost being a cliche. Whether in the consumer (Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox) or enterprise (Slack) space,...
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Startup Marketing Compendium of 12 Posts on Positioning, Branding, Messaging...
I continue to see some very smart entrepreneurs missing out on exploiting what marketing can do for them, as they keep failing to understand marketing itself. I’ve written a lot about startup marketing...
View ArticleHealthy tension in product teams
Product teams are made up of a mess of human emotions and motivations, but well-functioning teams can reduce that tension into simple competing forces that make them stronger. Far from avoiding...
View Article7 Heuristics for being a Product Director
I’m a big believer in developing heuristics over the course of your life. These are rules of thumb you internalize so that you don’t have to re-invent the wheel the next time you do something similar....
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The Universe Will Try to Stop you from Building a Great Product. Don’t let it.
That quote, by Simon Vallee, product manager at Slack resonated with me at the Product Hunt One Year Anniversary event last Thursday Aug 27th in Toronto. That event was organized by Daryna Kuyla of...
View ArticleProduct Strategy With Massive Impact
Here’s just one small example of that. WhatsApp sends more messages every day (over 30 billion and growing rapidly) than there are SMS messages sent in a typical day (about 20 billion and falling...
View ArticleThis Is How You Build Products for the New Generation of ‘Data Natives’
Imagine a major intersection where all the innovation taking place in data analytics and all the advances in hardware meet. It would look a lot like Monica Rogati’s job at Jawbone. As VP of Data, she...
View ArticleThe Simple Rules That Could Transform How You Launch Your Product
After months in stealth and bullish reviews from beta users, it was Cluster’s time to fly. Co-founder and CEO Brenden Mulligan knew no one had cracked private, group photo sharing at scale. He could...
View ArticleWhy Continuous Deployment Just Keeps On Giving
We’ve been doing it since the earliest days of the company. At Intercom’s recent event, On Product, I gave a talk about the unexpected benefits of continuous deployment – what follows is a lightly...
View ArticleThe Missing Habit Separating Good and Great Product Managers
There are many skills that go into being a great product manager, and one of the most underrated is communication, as these Silicon Valley product leaders emphasize: “As a product manager, it is...
View ArticleCreating Successful SaaS Products
If you’ve ever asked yourself this question, you’re not alone. We’ve spent years thinking about this question, and after talking with a lot of very smart people about how they approach it, we decided...
View ArticleSlack’s First Product Manager on How to Make a Firehose of Feedback Useful
When Kenneth Berger joined Slack in June 2014, the company was at the beginning of its much-buzzed-about ascent. As its first product manager, he managed the product’s functionality as it grew from...
View Article8 Customer Discovery Questions to Validate Product Market Fit for Your Startup
When I was a PM at Google, we conducted customer research often to understand our customers’ opinions on AdSense. In 2005, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were vying to win dominant share of advertising...
View ArticleTwo Product Principles Often Forgotten
Superficially it explains the difference in survival methods between a hedgehog and a fox. A fox knows many ways to trick, deceive and outmanoeuvre predators, the hedgehog knows one, but it’s a big...
View Article5 Mistakes SaaS Startups Often Make with Pricing
The purpose of a price is to tax usage of a product. That’s how companies generate revenue. Discovering how to tax a product properly is a perpetual challenge. It’s a moving target and so it requires...
View ArticleLet’s talk about Product Management
I spent over a decade as a product manager at a number of different companies. One thing I realized was how little we talked about the job of product management. I rarely met product managers from...
View ArticleDesign is a conversation
It’s often said design is a dialogue between designer and user. We talk to users about what they want and need. We discuss projects with our colleagues to examine problems and uncover solutions....
View Article10x Not 10%
For more than a century, the Eastman Kodak Company dominated the photography market. From Hollywood, to the Apollo project, to family reunions, Kodak was there, recording our lives. Known for...
View Article3 Types of Product Management
It’s oddly hard to get a straight answer to this question. Let alone a succinct one. The most common explanation looks like this one: What, exactly, is a Product Manager? Mind the Product If someone...
View ArticleThis is How Effective Leaders Move Beyond Blame
The security incident at Symantec. The Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal. The market rigging allegations at Citigroup. In each of these cases, employees were singled out as the root causes for an...
View ArticleDesigners shouldn’t code. They should study business.
Increasingly, more and more companies are looking for great design leadership these days. They are being told that their company needs a bigger focus on design thinking and are keen to adopt more...
View ArticleOn The Path To Product Market Fit, Don’t Wait For Statistical Significance
Data is powerful because it’s black and white. It’s concrete. Data takes the guesswork and gut calls out of decisions. And data has helped transform marketing’s perception from fluffy and “arts and...
View ArticleRICE: Simple prioritization for product managers
Prioritization is a perennial challenge when building a product roadmap. How do you decide what to work on first? If you’ve put the effort into brainstorming new ideas, finding opportunities for...
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