The term ‘product discovery’ refers to the process by which we decide whether to address a problem or not, and if we do what type of solution would work the best. It also covers the discovery of a business model and the validation of key assumptions.
Inspiration often comes from unusual sources. Jazz musician Wynston Marsalis was asked “what do you do when things aren’t working and you are not making the progress that you would expect”. Wynston’s answer was simple “You go deeper”.
Product managers need to have a wide set of abilities – understanding good user experience is a particularly important one to have. One of the most valuable competencies I ever learned was to prototype. This helped me to better understand how products and product features decompose into screens and elements.
Customers buy benefits. They may ask about features, and they may talk about features but during the purchase decision, all they are thinking about are their benefits. Yet internally, our whole company is talking about features and roadmaps of features. Why?
There are 3 business model canvases that I have used in the past – each with a different sweet spot of application and its worth being familiar with them all. Sketching a business model is a 15 minute task that could save you years of wasted time building products. So lets dive in.
Doing competitive analysis is never easy. Some information is just hard to find. And when find information, it’s tempting to dive straight into our analysis. But how do we manage the incompleteness of our information? Data Robot!
Listing In-App Products (IAPs) on the Play Store is relatively simple. IAPs come in two categories: Managed In-App Products (a one-time purchase such as buying a new weapon in gaming app ) Subscriptions (a renewing purchase such as a monthly subscription to a magazine) Let’s learn how to set up subscriptions.
The free iPad Question One of the most challenging parts of being a product manager is being tasked with finding out what customers really value. Yet unless we ask the right questions in the right way, we may be getting answers that are lead us to wrong conclusion. Here is how to avoid that from happening.
The 7 C’s of building a product for global scale I thought about this question a lot in my current company. To be able to scale to a truly global size tomorrow, what do we need to be doing today. What type of things must be true if the product successfully scaled to millions of users?
A blog post about Early Adopters. Like Mythical creatures such as centaurs or unicorns, authors speak with such certainty about Early Adopters; what their adoption curve is like/how many of them you see in the early days; how to leverage them for information once you find them.
It’s Not Technical Being a product guy for over ten years now, I have seen countless times how a picture is worth a 1000 words. The real challenge in building software isn’t technical; everything can technically be built. The real challenge is in communication.
We product people can get very precise. We may describe how something should be built, what features our software must have, what colour a button should be. But precision can be your enemy. Let’s find out why.
I typically say to my team “do not ask people if they like or would buy something, instead find out why anyone cares and what they care about”. You start by dividing what people say into two categories; that which you can trust and that which you cannot.
It is so important to find the best pricing for your product. It is important to avoid setting price point too high, and equally important not to set them too low. Too few or too many pricing points leads to customer confusion and fatigue. Read on to learn how to price without guesswork.
Have you ever been interviewed yourself for being a potential customer? I was last week. It went badly to say the least and made me reflect on what mistakes not to make when trying to get insight from talking to customers.