Latest Essays

So you want to pursue a career in product management—great! However, the product manager job posts you’ve come across list having product management experience—not great! Don’t worry! Here’s some guidance on how you can start your product management journey.

Starting as a product manager brings both excitement and challenges. Along the way, there are numerous valuable lessons to be learned in overseeing products, coordinating teams, and achieving success. Reflecting on my own experience, I share the top 12 things I wish I had known as a product manager, aiming to provide guidance to aspiring professionals starting their journey.

Comparing your product’s growth metrics with those of your competitors is an essential tool for measuring progress, spotting your position in the market, and identifying areas for improvement. However, this method comes with some caveats.

One of the biggest pitfalls of comparing metrics is the potential for misleading results. Even products that are in the same category can have different mechanisms working behind their metrics, making direct comparisons difficult.

The key is to go beyond metrics and focus on the processes that they represent. Only after having a clear understanding of the problem that your product and your competitor are solving can you start determining which metrics (if any) are suitable to compare their performance.

One of the concepts that is crucial to product work is compound interest and exponential growth. This is a topic that has been adopted from other fields of natural and social sciences into product management. It is crucial in tracking, measuring, and forecasting product growth loops. Understanding compound interest and exponential growth can help you identify growth opportunities, make correct decisions and avoid the pitfalls of product growth.

In this article, we will discuss the basics of compound interest and exponential growth and how it applies to product management.

Considering a move from product analytics to product management? It’s a natural progression that reflects the desire to expand beyond data analysis and strategic recommendations into actively guiding the product development journey. This move combines analytical expertise with creativity to transform imaginative ideas into concrete, market-ready products.

As product managers, we regularly use percentages in different ways to measure different metrics. But despite their intuitive simplicity, percentages have different nuances that can make them confusing or misleading if used improperly.

In this article, we’ll discuss percentages, percentage points, and percentiles, along with their uses in product management along with best practices and pitfalls to avoid.

In May 2023 we launched the SQL Simulator for Product Analytics. The team of creators who authored the simulator—Eugene Zhulkov, Oleg Ya, and Osman Ramazanov—share details about how they discovered the need for a purpose-built SQL course for product and marketing-adjacent people. While creating the new educational product from scratch, they discovered and overcame several challenges.

Data-driven decision-making is essential for success in product management. And one of the important parts of any kind of data-driven work is measuring and understanding central tendencies in data samples. 

Central tendencies refer to the typical or average values of a set of data points, and they can provide insights into the overall performance of your product. Measuring central tendencies is becoming increasingly important in any kind of decision-making that involves data. And product managers have to make decisions based on data on a daily basis.

There are several ways to measure central tendencies, but the most commonly used methods are arithmetic mean and median. In this article, we will explore these two measures, compare them, and see how they can be used in product work.

There are two main tracks for getting hired as a product manager: applying internally and looking for a new employer. Let’s take a look at both cases and discuss recommendations that will help you stand out.

Are you considering a career in product management? Before taking the leap, it’s important to assess whether this path aligns with your skills, interests, and goals. With product management roles varying across industries, product types, and company sizes, it can be challenging to determine if it’s the right fit for you.