Category: Product Research

  • John Maynard Keynes v Henry Ford

    John Maynard Keynes v Henry Ford

    Keynes believed that value is often determined by what we think other people want. Ford believed customers cannot fully capable of describing what they want (they would ask for a faster horse, not an automobile) Are they both right? Or should we really ask customers what they want.

  • Why B2B customer discovery is hard

    Why B2B customer discovery is hard

    Customer discovery is a process for testing your core business assumptions. It is a process which helps us learn more about our customer segments, problem, solution and value proposition. What makes customer discovery more difficult for a B2B product? How can we overcome these challenges?

  • Going Deeper

    Going Deeper

    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”.

  • Anatomy of a Prototyping Project

    Anatomy of a Prototyping Project

    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.

  • Data Robot

    Data Robot

    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!

  • The free iPad Question

    The free iPad Question

    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.

  • I cannot describe my wheelchair

    I cannot describe my wheelchair

    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.