Latest Essays

You’ve built a product and found a user segment for which you have product/market fit. If users from this segment learn about your product and experience its value for themselves, they will choose it for getting the job done.

This is when you start planning how to get the word out to potential users about your product’s value. But what happens if you simply say that you have some new way of solving their problem? Odds are that their behavior won’t change.

Generally speaking, people want to go with the flow and are reluctant to try new things.

Why does Netflix release all episodes of a season at once, while most other streaming providers release episodes on a weekly basis?

I don’t have any data, but here are my thoughts on the pros and cons.

Data drives product management. Product managers rely on data for everything from creating an easy buying experience to determining if a product should even be developed. And while data is used to inform all aspects of managing a product, are there different considerations for using data for long-term strategy vs. daily decisions? 

It turns out that the answer is yes. While there are many similarities, like needing to ensure success is clearly defined, for strategic decisions more context, expertise, and qualitative data is required. Data used for strategic decisions tends to be higher quality, take longer to collect, and be more expensive than data used for everyday decisions. Data mistakes, such as bias or incorrect benchmarking, are also more costly to the organization when they happen in the context of creating a strategy.

For a thoughtful approach to product growth and development, it’s critical to know the tasks and contexts that create the jobs-to-be-done (JTBDs) handled by your product.

As a product manager, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that your product is an important part of your user’s life or that you have a loyal customer base.

But that’s not always the case.

Can you persuade one user to switch to your product?

That’s where your growth foundation is.

As 2022 comes to a close, we would like to share some key milestones that our team achieved this year.

Imagine you have just rolled out a new feature after long weeks of development. Or maybe a whole product redesign.

But right after that, you notice the metrics going down. What would you do?

Did you know you can improve user retention but make a product worse?

Product metrics don’t always reflect how effectively a product solves a user’s problem.

We began this series with how product habits get made and why the neurotransmitter dopamine is so important for this process. Then we looked at the Hook Model, which Nir Eyal created to explain habit formation. Here in our concluding article, we will look at which products by definition cannot be habit-forming, what user habits can be confused with, and alternative ways to encourage users to interact with a product more often.