Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

This schism between marketing and product management is still felt in many tech organizations today, where both departments feel they own the customer and understand the marketplace. However, in most tech organizations, marketing has evolved to be more about owning the brand and customer acquisition, while product owns the value proposition and dev

“You have two ears and one mouth. Use them proportionally.”

‘think big, start small,’ ‘ship to learn,’

time. Instead, a productive use of time is figuring out what the right questions are and where to get the answers to those questions. A culture where it’s OK for anyone on the team to say, “I don’t know, but I can find out,” nurtures responsibility and maturity, and is a far better strategy than pretending to be a human search engine.

A core product or platform provides a lens through which other business and operational decisions can be filtered. It becomes infinitely easier to project out from the core and inform marketing and sales, customer service and support, and customer success.

Switching from whatever product or solution they use today has a real cost, so your solution doesn’t just have to be better — it has to be so much better it’s worth the effort to switch.

Unsurprisingly, finding out who your users and customers are gets to the core of your business value. Mapping this value allows you to determine the best metrics to measure your business.

“I think return usage or any measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty are really important, because I think we’ve seen in the history of the internet that there are many companies with incredible topline figures, but at the end of the day those companies stall because they don’t have any retention and they can’t hold on to their users.”

To give you an example of what that hyper-speed research looks like, we just did this two weeks ago where on day one we were exploring lots of solutions with divergent thinking. Day two is where we regroup with the engineers and product managers to converge ideas and kind of figure out what we’re really trying to learn. Day three, we’re finalizing