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Product management is about building carrots, not sticks

Paul Ford’s Carrot Centralization is a great plea for the importance of user research, but I think he also inadvertently came up with an excellent definition for product management:

You might think our job is to build software but just as often it’s to help you avoid building the wrong software. And when you build, build carrots.

Because, as he says earlier in the post:

Carrots work. Sticks don’t. Computers can’t make people do things. They have to want to do things.

A positioning framework for product managers

Sachin Rekhi reviews April Dunford’s book Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It in his post Positioning for Product Managers:

While 2000’s Differentiate or Die spoke at length on why positioning is important, it never really went into detail on how to actually go about developing your product’s positioning. The traditional approach is to develop a positioning statement. While useful as an output to your positioning process, it really doesn’t describe the process one could use to come up with such a positioning statement. That’s why I was excited to read April Dunford’s new book entitled Obviously Awesome, which is an in-depth tactical guide on how to go about actually developing your product’s positioning.

The reality when it comes to positioning is that most companies end up with default positioning. This is simply leveraging the positioning that the original folks who came up with the product concept thought about when they conceptualized the product offering. But what’s important is to be deliberate about your product’s positioning because a great product could end up failing due to poor positioning alone.

He also discusses April’s advice to replace a “positioning statement” with a deeper 5-part positioning framework which defines the following for your product. This is a really good summary of the book.

Make accessibility part of planning for every project

In Getting to the Heart of Digital Accessibility Carie Fisher makes a compelling argument for making accessibility a priority in tech companies. Her conclusion really resonated with me:

Maybe I’m naive, but I’d like to think we’ve come to a point in our society where we want our work lives to have meaning. And that we don’t want to just hear about the positive change that is happening, but want to be part of the change. Digital accessibility is a place where this can happen! Not only does understanding and writing purpose-driven code help people with disabilities in the short-run, I believe strongly that is key to solving the overarching diversity issue in tech in the long-run. Developers who reach Stage 4: Understanding, and who prioritize accessible code because they understand it’s fundamentally about people, will also be the ones who help create and cultivate an inclusive environment where people from more diverse backgrounds are also prioritized and accepted in the tech world.

She mainly mentions developers in this article, but I’d argue that it is very much also the responsibility of product managers to make sure accessibility is always in the discussion on projects. We need to make sure that if extra time is needed for accessibility, we build that into the planning.

Further reading

For some practical advice on how to make emails more accessible, see Accessibility vs. Inclusion: What it Takes to Create More Inclusive Email Marketing Experiences and Email Accessibility: Looks aren’t everything.

For an example of how not to approach this topic, see Should websites be accessible to everyone? Domino’s says no.

Measure product teams by value created, not number of features launched

In his post Why Feature FOMO Stalls Product Innovation Brian Crofts discusses the many reasons why product teams tend to add a slew unnecessary features to a product. This issue hit close to home:

Pendo’s recent State of Product Leadership survey found that 77% of product teams are evaluated based on the number of features they ship. This gives product teams an implied incentive to add more, regardless of whether those features are being used and adopted.

I can only trust that this has changed by now, but when I worked at eBay product managers were measured by how many PRDs they wrote. The things didn’t even have to ship. The measure was literally “How many Word templates did you fill out this quarter?”

Instead, Brian proposes a better way:

Technology brands should hold their product teams accountable for metrics that have the greatest impact on success. Instead of the raw number of features shipped or revenue driven, metrics such as feature adoption, customer happiness, and customer engagement are critical. These measures point to which features are working now and help form longer-term rollout strategy.

Collaboration > tooling

Brad Frost argues that design tools are holding us back because “they require a specific toolchain in order to function”. Instead, what we need is closer collaboration:

Tooling can help, sure, but it’s not a silver bullet. To truly address the realities of the medium for which you’re designing, designers and developers should collaborate as equals to solve problems together. That means more talking and real-time collaboration and less time spent throwing static artifacts and Zeplin links at each other.

The importance of getting customer feedback before product launches

I’m not usually a fan of posts like this, but I just couldn’t resist clicking on Pink Floyd Were Masters At Achieving Product-Market Fit. The first of seven “lessons” is the one that stands out for me:

Obtain Customer Feedback Before You Release Your Product

Musicians spend their entire youth writing songs and performing them in front of live audiences, which ensures that their initial album is validated by their fans before they enter the recording studio.

Unfortunately, successful musicians seldom have the luxury of market testing their subsequent albums. Instead of refining their material based on customer feedback, they are often lock away in a recording studio, isolated from their fans. Thus, it is no surprise that many bands suffer the sophomore jinx, in which their second album fails to achieve the success of their initial release.

Pink Floyd recorded Dark Side of the Moon after a year of writing and performing the material in front of live audiences. This audience feedback allowed the band to iteratively modify their creation.

Lesson: Avoid the sophomore jinx with your product launches by continuing to seek market validation, despite your initial success.

I guess in the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I wrote a post like this once: A story about Miles Davis and the nature of true genius.

Reducing Time to Value, and other important product-led growth metrics

In 8 essential metrics for measuring product-led growth Katryna Balboni discusses a few important metrics for measuring and monitoring product-led growth (i.e., turning users into advocates so that they can they drive more acquisition and growth). Time to Value is one that seems particularly useful:

Time to value (TTV) is the amount of time it takes new users to realize your product’s value. Your goal should be to reduce time to value as much as possible-the sooner users reach their first aha moment or activation event, the better.

To do this, focus on optimizing your user onboarding experience around the key actions within your product that correlate to activation-like inviting colleagues to your platform, importing customer data, or integrating with other tools in their tech stack.

The best response to a product is “I happily give you money”

This was fun. I got to talk to the productboard team about our values and how we approach product strategy at Postmark. Here’s an excerpt from the article For Postmark, Product Excellence means enabling startups and developers to build great things:

For every feature that goes into delivery, and when considering Postmark’s product as a whole, Rian aims for customers to have two primary responses. One is: “Well that was easy.” The second is: “I don’t mind paying for this at all.”

“We want to create enough value so we’re not seen as just another app that our customers have to grudgingly pay for every month. We want to be the kind of software that we ourselves would enjoy using and paying for. I feel like that’s such a great metric: ‘I happily give you my money.’ That is the best response to a product.

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