I like Jason Knight’s take on 5 Different Types of Debt That Can Hinder Your Product Organization. There’s the usual “tech debt” advice, of course, but also some good insight on other types of debt to look out for, such as…

Revenue debt builds up as companies scale up through unstructured sales-led growth, selling to anyone they can, meaning that they start to build dependencies on a disparate set of customers who have sometimes substantially different needs. This makes focusing, or even saying no, too difficult because there’s too much revenue tied up in each segment.

It took me many years to rid myself of the commonly-held belief that Sales is the “enemy” of Product. Here’s a good reminder that (good) Sales teams are our allies:

Contrary to stereotypes, only part of sales actually involves convincing a customer to buy your product. The person selling your product spends a very large amount of time helping customers successfully navigate their own complex organizations, and purchase a product that they already want (yours).

I like this framing by Casey Winters on how to evaluate Feature/Product Fit when you release something new:

Feature/Product Fit has a third requirement that is a bit different: the feature has to improve retention, engagement, and/or monetization for the core product. This last part can be a bit confusing for product teams to understand. Not only do the products they are building need to be used regularly and attract their own usage to be successful, they also need to make the whole of the product experience better.

Any new feature is part of the larger product system, and our success metrics should take that into account.

This is a highly opinionated piece (nothing wrong with that!) and I think there’s some nuance needed, but in general I like these principles from How To Ship Fast. This one is definitely a hot take, but in a dream world where everything is perfect I would agree:

Time spent on prioritization is the canary in the coal mine for not being close enough to your customers. The discrete task of prioritization should take almost no time. Only work on Important things. Sort those Important things into “Do now” and “Do next”. If you are only working on Important things, the order does not matter too much (and don’t spend time debating it). If what’s Important is not obvious you are not close enough to your customers.

Great post by April Dunford on how marketing teams and sales teams need to tell different stories about a product:

Our goals in marketing are very different from our goals in a sales situation. Often in marketing, we are simply trying to capture an audience’s attention and get their permission to continue marketing to them. […] Sales, on the other hand, is generally dealing with the folks who have already raised their hand in some form and are in a purchase process. Our primary job in sales is to help guide prospects through the purchase process.

However, both approaches to storytelling need to come from the same positioning source:

Sales and marketing should use the same inputs for whatever storytelling structure they choose, and those inputs should come from our positioning. Both marketing and sales communicate the value that the product delivers that no other solutions can. Both have a common definition of what a good-fit prospect looks like. Both teams need to understand the alternative approaches, including the status quo and more direct short-list competitors. Our positioning defines the inputs for marketing and sales content—we ultimately need commonality across marketing and sales because our positioning defines where we win and why.

In his characteristic spicy way Marty Cagan says that if you want to replace product managers that’s fine—but be careful:

If you’re a CEO or GM, you might be thinking that instead of trying to recruit and develop strong, true product managers, maybe you’ll just do like Apple and skip the product managers, and you’ll just take responsibility for value and viability yourself?

If so, it’s critical to understand that the Apple product model depends on exceptionally strong product leaders. Many of Apple’s product leaders have 10–25 years of experience building world-class products at Apple.

In Lessons from going freemium: a decision that broke our business, Bobby Pinero (CEO of Equals) makes some interesting points about what they’ve learned about freemium pricing models. This point about how user friction is not always a bad thing stood out to me:

In all of our pursuit of getting people into the product, the thing we forgot is that the goal of onboarding is not for people to complete onboarding. It’s not to just get people into the product. The goal of onboarding is for people to get their first moments of value from your product. To get “activated.” And removing friction is actually detached from this goal.

Just like everything in product, this all depends. Every business is different. But it’s nice to see things from another perspective

I like this perspective from Ed Sim on recognizing that you can’t always build yourself into product-market fit…

There is no easy answer for a lack of customer traction, but my one suggestion before you commit to the idea that you are one feature away from success, is to go back to the basics and first ask if this is the right user or customer. If you believe you have that nailed, try multiple messages and keep learning from every interaction. You may have the right product today but for the wrong user. Or you simply may just have a cool technology in search of a problem to solve in which case you should start completely over.

I don’t like the “10x” terminology in tech, but The 10x Exercise for Entrepreneurs is not that. It’s about a thought exercise for entrepreneurs as they start to reach product-market fit:

What does our employee org chart look like with ten times the scale? What will our customer mix look like at ten times the revenue? What types of funding sources and capital stack will I need to fund the growth of the business to achieve this scale? What types of partnerships, infrastructure, and geographic locations will be necessary to 10X the business?