Startup Product Management

This is the third (and final) part in a series of blog posts documenting our path to launching our SaaS product, Screenful. We have now happily launched our product and we’re ready to share the lessons we learned along the way. If you missed them, catch Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. When it came to our Read more »

This is the second part in the series of blog posts documenting our path to launching a SaaS product. The first part of this series is available here: Part 1 – Launching a B2B SaaS product Now that we’re getting closer to our launch date, we’re busy preparing. For us, that means coding, design work, documentation, and generally Read more »

“If software is eating the world, then product managers are setting the menu”. Des Traynor, co-founder of customer communication platform Intercom, talks about how to create simple, yet brilliant products. He asks us to consider where products come from and how they are made, arguing that a product manager should know where the product stops Read more »

Why is it that some products take off while others fall flat? There are many tactical reasons we can point to such as timing, competition, or product-market fit. Fundamentally though, there is one consistent truth regardless of the reason we may determine: some products create value for the market they’re serving, and some simply do Read more »

Thou shall not say “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.” This was among the lessons we learned from Dave Wascha, Chief Product Officer at Moo.com, at ProductTank March. As Dave said, “This is the most scary, terrifying, insidious thing we face as product managers, and the older you get the more baggage you Read more »

I built the same product three times. It wasn’t an act of insanity. It was my way to get my product ready in three weeks. Before I get to that, let me backtrack a little. It was the 1st of March 2013 and I’d just left my job as CIO at one of the UK’s Read more »

With today’s news that Facebook has acquired group messaging app WhatsApp for over $16 billion one of the quietest companies in Silicon Valley has proven the value of extreme product focus, and upset a few cardinal rules along the way. Read more »

Is your product disruptive or sustaining? There’s nothing wrong with being sustaining by the way – a disruptive company that is successful quickly becomes a sustaining company. The important thing is to understand where on this spectrum you lie because both need to think differently when it comes to everything from marketing to how to Read more »

Innovation is critical to the success of any product or business, but today it’s so simple to test and measure iterative innovation that we forget that there is a whole other class of innovation – the long shot. You just can’t get to these innovations through a process of marginal gains which makes them much Read more »

There have only been 10 startups that have exited for over a billion dollars in the last 5 years, but at Mind the Product 2013, George Berkowski showed that there’s still huge opportunity out there. There are still 6 feature phones for every smart phone in the market and as prices come down that means Read more »