June 15, 2023 Table of Contents What is Product Analytics Again? Step 1: Map Out the End-to-End User Journey Step 2: Collect Hypothesis-Driven Data Step 3: Master the 3 Components of a Healthy Data Infrastructure Expert Advice for Product Analytics Success When it comes to building high-impact products, most product managers get in the driver's seat and “feel the need for speed.” They want fast data to get fast answers to deliver even faster product impact.  Before you find yourself putting on those aviators and channeling Top Gun ideals, take a moment to understand that speeding ..read more

  Table of Contents The New Reforge for Teams Introducing our New Pricing and Packaging What does this mean for Individual Members? When we started Reforge in 2015, we built it mainly to help individual members unlock step change growth in their careers. We helped businesses by helping those individuals. We continue to be fiercely dedicated to the mission of helping individuals do the best work of their careers. But over time, we’ve increasingly seen our members join as teams. In fact, over half of our current members are on team accounts. When we interviewed our community to get the stor ..read more

  Table of Contents Where do users fit in product development? 3 Common User Story Makes Product Managers Make To Use or Not to Use User Stories The Misuse of User Stories – a title like that begs the question: Who misused them, how, and why? Foundational questions for a classic whodunnit novel. Well, user stories may not be literary works of art, but they very well may be the red herrings in their own tale. A red herring is something that misleads or distracts you from the real issue in a story, and is exactly how our experts describe user stories. “Where I see a lot of gaps happen is t ..read more

  Table of Contents Why So Many AI Products Fail The AI Survival Curve: Where Lucrative Opportunities Live How to Overcome the Disadvantages of AI How to Build AI Products People Actually Want Roughly every decade, technology makes a giant leap that erases the old rules and wipes out our assumptions. The Internet. Mobile. Video. Blockchain. Like clockwork, companies and creators begin a mad race to make money off the next big thing, burning through ungodly sums of cash in the process. Unless you’ve been living off the grid for the past year, it’s clear that the next big thing is artificia ..read more

  Feb 6, 2023 Table of Contents Breaking Free from Scrum Purists Why do Scrum Masters fail? What are Scrum Masters Trying to Solve for? The year was 1995, and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction wasn’t the only chaotic thing shaking up the world. Javascript had just hit the scene and everyone in the software development industry was frantically trying to build things as quickly as possible, mostly leaving process to happenstance. At best, any attempt to build faster was ineffective. At worst, it was counterproductive. After five years of witnessing antipattern after antipattern emerge, Ken ..read more

  Summer self-care takes many forms. For some, that might mean working on your golf swing. For others, that could mean laying out at the beach. (Don’t forget the sunscreen!) But for Reforge members? They can do a little of both while getting ahead in their career. This July, we’re offering our first ever Summer Cohort where Reforge members can access the frontier knowledge of tech’s best and brightest right at their fingertips — and you can too.  We’re even more excited to announce the new experts that will be joining us to lead these Summer 2022 Cohort of programs: Hila Qu, Forme ..read more

Data shows that customer-centered businesses outperform their competition.  According to a survey from California Review Management, companies who said their customer focus was “very mature” experienced 2.5X the revenue growth of companies with a “very immature” focus.  And it can touch every aspect of the organization: Engaged employees are a key part of operating a successful customer-centric business, which, when done well, drives a feedback loop that can power talent recruitment and retention. But too often, another story emerges: Tech companies lose sight of their customers as t ..read more

Product Managers are ultimately responsible for figuring out what to build and ensuring it is impactful.  Simple in theory, but not easy.  PMs have to source and process ideas from every direction, rationalize and advocate for which investments make sense, and hold steady in conviction about their roadmap while staying flexible for things to change as they learn. For decades, the Product Requirement Doc (PRD) has been the instrument of the trade, the single source of truth for what to build and why.   In the 90s, PRDs spanned 20-30 pages and were meant to be the definitive ..read more

Advertisers are losing control. As platforms like Meta and Google automate most targeting, attribution, and optimization decisions with machine learning, soon the last growth lever left will be creative testing: Which concepts, copy, colors and artwork drive the best results? Most every marketer is familiar with A/B testing, but few have a consistent framework for prioritizing what to test. As experiment backlogs spiral out of control, the process devolves to just do whatever the CEO says.  But you can avoid this fate by breaking creative ideas down to their component parts, or “memes,” a ..read more

If you’re involved in cross-functional work, it’s easy to fill your calendar with 1:1 meetings. They can be a high-fidelity way to build relationships and collaborate.  The problem is that most of us have no idea how to make them useful — or we’re embarrassed to cut the cord when they’re not — so we end up with a bloated calendar full of ineffective conversations that we dread.  I know this first hand because I’ve personally made all the 1:1 mistakes in the book. I’ve learned a few key lessons that have now helped me develop the confidence and clarity to own my calendar and ..read more