Video: Building Your Product Intuition with Feedback Rivers One of the hardest skills for product managers to master is product intuition. Too often we're told it just takes time & experience to build your intuition. But I've come to believe that we can in fact accelerate the process of building our own product intuition with a tool I call Feedback Rivers. In this video, I cover: Why building your product intuition is so important for your success as a product leader Why traditional methods of customer research fail to help us build our product intuition quickly How you can leverage F ..read more

Everyone knows that a critical part of developing a new product is talking to potential customers. So most product managers and founders dutifully have customer conversations as part of their product development process. But what's insidious about the way that people talk to customers is that they often fail to glean any new insights or worse, get a false positive, causing them to over invest their cash, their time, and their team in an unvalidated product idea that ultimately doesn't sell. This happens because our potential customers are unfortunately prone to lie to us. We are partly to bl ..read more

Video: Annual Planning and the Art of Roadmapping with Sachin Rekhi It's that time of year that product managers find themselves engrossed in annual planning. But the traditional frameworks PMs have come to rely on for roadmapping, like RICE, often are ill-suited for putting together a highly strategic product roadmap for the upcoming year. I joined Reforge recently to give a talk about a new process I developed, called 4D Roadmaps, that leverages 4 distinct lenses to develop your roadmap, including a strategy lens, vision lens, customers lens, and business lens. In the talk, I share this ..read more

Video: How Today's Product Builders Find Product/Market Fit I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Fareed Mosavat, Chief Development Officer at Reforge, for a discussion on how today's product builders find product/market fit. We started by pointing out the shortcomings of the Lean Startup methodology, which remains the most popular approach to finding product/market fit today. We then discussed some of the more modern approaches that seasoned product builders have been leveraging to guide their path to product market fit, including: Running successful customer discovery intervie ..read more

The hardest part of bringing a new product to market is always the elusive hunt for product/market fit. Marc Andreessen describes product/market fit as "being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market". I've dedicated my entire career to five such hunts across the three startups I co-founded as well as the new products I built at LinkedIn and Microsoft. Despite sounding so simple, I have plenty of scars from failing to find product/market fit, but also from the long and winding path it ultimately took to get there. In 2007 I founded my first startup, Anywhere.FM, which de ..read more

Video: Product Strategy, Systems, and Frameworks with Sachin Rekhi Slides: LinkedIn Learning: Product Strategy, Systems, and Frameworks I was recently invited to speak as part of the Product Management Learning Series hosted by LinkedIn Learning. We covered a variety of my favorite product frameworks. We started our discussion with some of the most effective ways to make a career transition into product management. The first approach is leveraging an adjacent role, like business operations, marketing, design, and engineering, to work with and impress your product partner and parlaying that ..read more

For years now I've been obsessed with understanding unique product cultures and how they enable companies to build world class products. One particular product culture that has always fascinated me is Amazon and their unique writing culture. I love talking to Amazon employees about how the writing culture is interwoven into their product development process and the pros and cons of it. But I was even more excited when Colin Bryar and Bill Carr published their new book, Working Backwards, which provides a deep dive into how the writing culture originated, the problems it sought to solve, the b ..read more

The Lean Startup methodology, first described in 2008 by Eric Ries, has taken the startup world by storm. His 2011 book, The Lean Startup, has become a New York Times best seller, selling millions of copies to aspirational entrepreneurs. The concepts the methodology describes, from hypothesis testing, to MVPs, to pivots, have become common vernacular in startup circles. And every major business school now offers an innovation class that leverages the business model canvas and other lean principles for developing a new product idea. When an ideology becomes dominant, I find it helpful to rea ..read more

The most important journey any new product goes through is finding product/market fit. Marc Andreessen, who popularized the term, defined it as: Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. Despite sounding so simple, the majority of new products fail due to never finding this illusive fit. This fit illudes both new startups creating their very first product as it does established organizations seeking to expand their product portfolio. From Viddy to Quibi to Google Wave, we can all name famous product failures. And even more die quietly with ..read more

Video: How to Master Influencing Without Authority Slides: How to Master Influencing Without Authority Essays: The Art of Being Compelling | Engaging in Product Debates | The Most Underrated Product Management Skill: Influence Without Authority In June I was invited by Dan Olsen to speak at the Lean Product Meetup. I decided to give a talk on what I believe to be one of the most underrated skills in product management: influencing without authority. It's widely understood that product managers own the product but do not manage any of the resources required to successfully launch and iterate ..read more