Data Driven Product Management

While matchmaking is a core lever of any marketplace business, data crunched by Uber, Airbnb, and other marketplaces shows that engineering an optimal marketplace sometimes defies common sense. For example. You finish dinner and are ready to head home. You see plenty of Uber drivers, but you’re matched with a car 10 minutes away. It Read more »

Jorge Rodriguez-Ramos considers how you can best incorporate data-driven decisions into product management. Read more »

In this ProductTank London talk, Nathan Kinch, CEO at Greater Than X, examines the issues of ethics, privacy, and trust. He looks at how product managers can kick-start their ethics journey and ship products that make life better for everyone. The Edelman Trust Barometer is a resource that measures levels of trust in different contexts. It Read more »

In this ProductTank London talk, Ben Fields, formerly Lead Data Scientist at FutureLearn, looks at getting the most from the relationship between product managers and data people, working out people’s background understanding, the benefits of leading with a story, and how best to spread knowledge. There are three key aspects of how data science can Read more »

What makes a great product decision? The answer to this question is like the Holy Grail of product management: it promises success and prosperity but no clear evidence that it exists. In this post I examine the way I think about the path: what has worked for me and helped me grow as a product Read more »

Hello product designers, this is for you. I want to talk to you about product goals, metrics, and how they get muddled in the product design process, leading to some less than humane outcomes. But first a little story. In the early 1970s, two behavioural scientists working at Princeton University set out to investigate the psychology Read more »

Ash Williams (Evil Dead); Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita and Little Rock (Zombieland); Shaun (Shaun of the Dead); Alice (Resident Evil); Lisa Long (ProductTank).  All have killed zombies, and entertained us as they did so…  but only Lisa did so on stage at London’s ProductTank, giving us practical advice on how to kill off zombie features and Read more »

Jenessa Lancaster is a data scientist at Ocado Technology. In this ProductTank London talk, she discusses the importance of communicating data concepts to non-specialist audiences. We live in promising times for data science in business development. Many organisations are increasing investments to their data science and machine learning departments, acknowledging the valuable insights that these Read more »

Facing uncertainty is a company’s biggest challenge. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in a startup or an established company, when you start work on a product, you need to validate your problem, your solution, and find your market. When you scale, uncertainty arises in the form of change – your market changes, your users’ needs Read more »

The rollercoaster ride that is product development is inherently chaotic and ever-changing. So, as process-oriented professionals, we product managers look to the structure and predictability of a scientific approach for certainty. Our inputs into such a scientific approach, however, are based on assumptions – either individual or corporate – that contain significant amounts of uncertainty. Read more »