Category posts
Interviews with expert PMs
We interview seasoned product people on various topics. Their expertise will help you find a path from your current career track to product management, get better at using data, and get a deeper understanding of your product in general.
Editorial

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.
(more…)Editorial

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.
(more…)Editorial

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.
(more…)Editorial

Junior product managers face both opportunities and challenges in the constantly evolving tech industry. They are learning to oversee the development and launch of new products while developing a deep understanding of the market, user behavior, and technology. Despite the industry’s ongoing changes, the potential for these new product managers to shape the product’s future and make a significant impact is vast.
(more…)Editorial

Although the term “product sense” may sound like just another buzzword, it’s important to understand the concept behind it.
Having a strong product sense means being able to create solutions that truly address your customers’ problems. By developing your product sense, you can improve your ability to identify gaps in the market, anticipate customer demand, and create products that truly resonate with your audience. So while it may be tempting to dismiss product sense as an industry fad, taking the time to truly understand its value can have a significant impact on your product’s development and your own professional growth.
(more…)Editorial

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.
(more…)Editorial

A quantitative data-driven culture is generally seen as very positive. It’s great for understanding performance and tweaking strategy. Quantitative data is useful for reducing risk and can be used for decisions that need a high degree of certainty. These situations are usually high enough of a priority that adequate time is allotted to use data to verify various experiments before the decision is made.
But there can be very real downsides. Data alone isn’t particularly useful for big transformations or concepts that don’t exist in the market. Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company, famously said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.” Ford’s customers actually wanted a faster way to travel, but lacked the language and vision to describe an automobile. Ford had to make the leap from “faster horse” to “car.” Data cannot do that.
(more…)Editorial

Where a product manager works affects their life, skills, and career. Startups and enterprises, i.e. large IT companies, are at opposite ends of the tech company spectrum, but they do have some things in common. Core product management skills are used in both environments, and both places have motivated, smart, and skilled professionals that want to help their customers. Both settings offer rich experiences that grow talent, however they differ in the types of skills that are most developed.
A startup teaches product managers how to move fast, tackle new problems, and wear many hats; an enterprise provides a chance to hone the product management craft and learn from successful experts in the field. Enterprises typically move slower than startups by design, and much of the extra time is spent communicating and negotiating with stakeholders. Because of the large user base, the impact of a product manager is usually broader than at a startup.
(more…)Editorial

Product managers know that understanding their market and competition inside and out is vital to the success of their products. Comprehensive market knowledge tells you what problems your customers are trying to solve, what they want, and ultimately what new features or products to build. Knowing the competitive landscape helps to set your business apart, allows you to create a strategy to deal with new competitive developments, and helps to arm your sales team to win against the competition.
(more…)Editorial

When an organization says they are data-driven, they typically mean that they base decisions on data. But there can be vast differences with how data is used to make these decisions. Is data only being used to validate straightforward decisions? Are multiple sources of data combined with other factors to determine priorities like the features to be worked on next quarter? Or is an exploration of data being used to spark innovation and determine new strategy? Each situation requires different skills, tools, and ways of working with data to be successful.
This is why the concepts of data-informed and data-inspired are being added to the data-driven discussion; they allow for a more nuanced definition of how data is actually used in an organization. Data-informed and data-inspired decisions consider depending not only on data for clear-cut decisions, but on using data in conjunction with other important influences and to invent something new.
Some may argue that adding the terms data-informed and data-inspired to the data-driven discussion adds complexity and muddles the discussion around data. While that may be true in some cases, really understanding how to correctly use data based on a particular need is critical to creating products that customers love. In the end, the terminology isn’t as important as making sure you’re getting the most out of data.
(more…)
Other content series
that you might find useful
- What is the difference between growth product manager, marketing manager, and core PM
- Two types of product work: creating value and delivering value
- Product/market fit can be weak or strong and can change over time
- Should a product be 10 times better to achieve product/market fit?
- How to measure the added value of a product
- Customer retention levers: task frequency and added value
- Product metrics, growth metrics, and added value metrics
- Product manager skills: evolution of a PM role and its transformation
- Addressing user pain points vs solving user problems better
- How product teams get the “aha moment” wrong
- How well do you articulate value during user activation? Check with the value communication framework
- Tax/benefit framework for analyzing user activation
- How to improve user activation by obtaining and leveraging additional user data
- Reducing friction, strengthening user motivation: onboarding scenarios and solutions
- Optimize user activation by reducing friction and strengthening motivation
- When to invest in optimizing user onboarding and activation
- Testing user activation fit for diverse use cases
- Why objective vs. perceived product value matters for activation
- Value windows: finding when users are ready to benefit from your product
- User activation starts long before sign-up
- Designing activation in reverse: value first, acquisition channels last
- CJM: from first encounter to the “aha moment”
- Session analysis: an important tool for designing activation
- When and why to add people to the user activation process
- Product-level building blocks for designing activation
- How time to value and product complexity shape user activation
- Time to value: an important lever for user activation growth
- How to determine the conditions necessary for the “aha moment”
- How to find “aha moment”: a qualitative plus quantitative approach
- How “aha moment” and the path to it change depending on the use case
- The dos and don’ts of measuring user activation
- User activation is one of the key levers for product growth
- When user activation matters and you should focus on it
- The values and principles of Wise. Key ideas from the Breakout Growth Podcast by Sean Ellis
- How Revolut Trading was built. The importance of industry expertise and the balance of conservative and new approaches
- How the “Slack vs Microsoft Teams” race evolves as the world switches to remote work
- Slack vs Teams vs Workplace: the intriguing dynamics of the work messenger market
- How to calculate unit economics for your business
- Guide to ARPU: formula, calculation example, LTV vs ARPU
- How to calculate customer Lifetime Value. The do’s and don’ts of LTV calculation
- Designing product experiments: template and examples
- Mistakes in A/B testing: guide to failing the right way
- Peeking problem – the fatal mistake in A/B testing and experimentation
- Why your A/B tests take longer than they should
- Experiments where you make your product worse – the most underrated product manager tool
- Avoid this pitfall when comparing your product’s metrics with your competitor’s
- Compound and exponential growth for product managers
- What product managers must know about percentages, percentage points, and percentiles
- Arithmetic mean and median for product managers
- Ways to estimate a competing app’s downloads, revenue, reach, and traffic
- How to design and run JTBD research interviews: guide and templates
- Not every product is habit-forming, but all products can have loyal users
- Hook Model: encouraging a product habit to improve retention
- How product habits are formed and what dopamine has to do with it
- Correlation and causation: how to tell the difference and why it matters for products
- Where to start as an aspiring product manager?
- How to move from product analytics to product management?
- Is product management the right choice for you? This is your checklist
- Common mistakes made by junior product managers and how to overcome them
- Product sense demystified. The importance behind the buzzword
- Using data for strategic decisions
- The downsides of a data-driven culture
- Moving from a startup to an enterprise as a product manager
- Using data to understand competitive and market dynamics
- Data-driven, data-informed, and data-inspired product decisions. What are the differences and when should you use each one?
- Pros and cons of a data-driven culture
- Quantitative vs qualitative data: what is the difference and when should you use one instead of the other
- Losing sight of real users and their needs behind the metrics. How can product teams avoid this?
- How to move from engineering to product management?
- How to establish effective collaboration between product managers and data analysts
- Metrics to focus on before and after product/market fit. How to better understand your product at different stages?
- How can PMs encourage more teammates to use data?
- Data cherry-picking to support your hypothesis. What is it? Why is it bad?
- Data mistakes to know and avoid as a product manager
- Key data skills for product managers: experienced PMs sharing their thoughts
- Where to start as an aspiring product manager?
- How to move from product analytics to product management?
- Get hired as a product manager: staying at your current company vs. looking elsewhere
- Is product management the right choice for you? This is your checklist
- Common mistakes made by junior product managers and how to overcome them
- Product sense demystified. The importance behind the buzzword
- What product managers should read and listen to in 2023
- Product manager interview: real questions plus guide for employers and candidates
- Moving from a startup to an enterprise as a product manager
- Product growth, reinvented: what growth hacking is (and isn’t)
- Retention: how to understand, calculate, and improve it
- Long-term retention—the foundation of sustainable product growth
- Rolling retention, Day N retention, and the many facets of the retention metric
- Traffic attribution models. Why attribution models need to change along with growth channels, product, business objective and external environment
- Errors in calculating ROI and unit economics. Impact of attribution models and incrementality on the ROI calculation of marketing channels