Product Strategy
LATEST POSTS
Uncovering Your Most Pivotal Users by Marieke McCloskey and Doug Puett
A lot of teams struggle with how to increase engagement. We all want our product to be used more often and by more people, but how do we identify opportunities that will transform how your product is used? UserTesting’s Product Insights proposes digging deeper to understand not simply the most engaged users, but those who’ve […]
Why We Fail: What I Learned From 5 Years with Friends, Netflix's Social Strategy
I write a lot about product strategy, and use Netflix as an example so that others can learn from the company’s success and failure. I often highlight that half of Netflix’s high-level product strategies fail in order to help product leaders to understand how hard it is to launch and grow startups. I also think […]
How Speed to Market Starts With a Strong Foundation
Imagine this: You’re in the middle of developing a product when you realize you’re going to miss the launch date. That’s never happened to you, right? Well, according to the Center for New Product Development, “the average new product development project exceeds its schedule by 120%.” So why does this happen, even to the best of […]
Why Simply "Allowing" Mistakes is a Dead-end for Agile Companies
Managing culture can quickly become one of the most complex challenges for companies that seek to scale agile practices. If self-organization and continuous improvement aren’t already tricky enough in a team of 10 individuals, they represent a daunting challenge when teams grow to the hundreds (not mentioning companies of thousands of people). Scaling agile practices[1] in […]
Take Care of the Misfit Toys: Managing End of Life Products
So you’ve read all those books and articles on how to become a product manager, about how tough it is, but also how rewarding it is. Now finally you’ve become one. I remember when I moved from being a sales engineer to product manager. I had a picture of myself in my new role. I […]
What Product Teams say and What They Really Mean — 10 Tips for Diagnosing Team Issues
Team issues can have a negative impact on a project and your people long term. There are a bunch of ways they might manifest themselves – and I’ve written them down as I’ve heard them over a decade of building digital products in cross-functional teams. I’m not touching on the upfront issues like bad sales […]
Product Discovery vs Daily Business by Natalie Moschner and Giorgia Gabrielli
In this talk to the MTP Engage Hamburg audience my colleague Natalie Moschner and I share some of our experiences and learnings from implementing product discovery in daily work routines, and we look at how we integrated product discovery in a firm with over 400 employees like AutoScout24. Product Discovery Basics Firstly, you should keep […]
The Hierarchy of Engagement by Sarah Tavel
How do you maximize your chances of building an enduring, consumer product? This is the big question for consumer companies, and in her #mtpcon San Francisco talk, Sarah Tavel, General Partner at Benchmark, says it comes down to understanding how to maximize engagement. Tavel’s Hierarchy of Engagement Throughout her career, Sarah has spent a lot […]
Plan Your Build, Don’t Build Your Plan: Get the Most From Your Retrospective
It was a Friday afternoon and I was feeling nervous. I was about to meet our biggest customer, an established enterprise owning some of the world’s most valuable brands. As our product helped companies, well, build their brand, it was a big deal. The meeting was planned to take only 25 minutes, so we got straight to […]
Launching a Multi-Sided Marketplace? Why Design Sprints are Essential
More and more enterprise businesses have embraced multi-sided marketplaces to extend existing business models and explore new territories for growth. For example, in 2009, Walmart launched its own Marketplace to connect third-party merchants with Walmart customers partly to catch up with Amazon’s already established third-party marketplace. General Motors launched Maven, a peer-to-peer marketplace that connects owners […]