Product Launch

On the first World Product Day, late last month, Mark Ryan, a senior product manager from messaging software supplier Intercom in London, gave a deeply personal talk at the probably highest-ever ProductTank venue – the 23rd floor at eSailors in Hamburg. He shared some great lessons on how Intercom has built a new version of […] Read more »

New product development is a risky business for companies – the failure rate for product launches hovers around 40%. A quick look at Product Hunt demonstrates there is a flourishing market for new products, all of them competing for our time and money. Companies that have previously found success with one product must invest in the next […] Read more »

“There is a way to do it better. Find it!” Thomas Edison Here’s the thing with innovation, you can’t just tell people to be innovative. A great idea doesn’t always come when you’re sitting at your desk between 9:00am and the end of your working day. Here at etventure we’ve tried various approaches to innovation […] Read more »

I am a product manager. I’ve been one for over a decade, and I absolutely love it! Building new products, and building them from scratch gives me a huge boost! Interestingly a few of these products have crossed the million-dollar mark; so I wanted to share a few of my secret mantras that can help you […] Read more »

A few months ago, I was given the task of delivering a product using technology that our company had never worked with and that our team had never encountered. My first thought was that it was highly risky and that there was little chance of success. But my second thought was: “OK, if I don’t […] Read more »

The ideas of Agile are great. It’s the way it has been codified into rituals and certifications, and rolled out mindlessly that misses the point. When people talk about Lean, the conversation often ends at process optimization, waste, and quality, and misses so much of what the Lean mindset offers. Design Thinking is held high as the […] Read more »

In working at Seedcamp and helping over 100 startups understand product thinking, Taylor Wescoatt has learned some valuable lessons he’d like to share, together with some real-world examples to drive the point home! Being the first product manager at a startup typically means being the 10th or 15th employee, and recognizing that – although product […] Read more »

How quickly your definition of “ambitious” can change. Five years ago getting a dog, starting a web company, working on huge projects here at Invoke all would have seemed hugely ambitious to me, but I’ve done them all. Building an effective real-time chat that syncs perfectly between consumers and supports e-commerce would have been ambitious […] Read more »

Assimilating new hires can take a big bite out of your schedule, but it’s a process I’ve always enjoyed, despite this. Having a captive audience eager to learn about the product is red meat to me. The only part of it that ever made me cringe was when a question about the product roadmap caught me […] Read more »

Every early-stage consumer startup spends most of its energy figuring out how to grow something really small to something really big. It is hard gain momentum from a standing start, so a lot of people look for distribution on top of another established platform, like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. However, founders often ask whether if […] Read more »