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Mind the Product

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Why great product managers think like therapists

Product Management

Sunday Rewind: Bootstrapping a product team by Ibrahim Bashir

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🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

The key principles of PLG: Leah Tharin at #mtpcon London 2025 (Product Advisor)

Why product managers are getting fired – Dave Wascha (CPTO and Advisor)

March’s top product management reads on Mind the Product

Breaking into product management: A practical guide for aspiring product professionals

5 difficult conversations and how to have them

In 2005, Gibson Biddle joined Netflix as VP of Product.  In 2010, he became Chief Product Officer of Chegg, a textbook rental company that went public in 2013. Today he speaks, leads product management workshops, and teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford. He’s also an adviser for multiple consumer tech companies. Gib lives in San Francisco and tries to ski his age in days each winter!

Gibson Biddle

<p>I have been the CPO/VP of Product for four startups as they scaled to thousands of employees. Because of these experiences — and the many challenges of growth — I’ve become obsessed with different tools and tactics that creative leaders can use to keep fast-growing companies pointed in the right direction.</p>
<p>Having a clear, well-defined mission, strategy and culture are helpful tools, but I&#8217;ve found that one of the best methods that helps to define a “true north” for a product organization is the creation of a product culture that obsesses over its customers.</p>
<p>In the first part of my career as a product leader, I learned to be customer focused. I listened carefully to customers, did my best to satisfy them, and maintained focus on what my competitors were doing. I did a good job and helped create some good products and companies. I sold my first startup Creative Wonders to The Learning Company and we eventually sold this company to Mattel for $3.5 billion. But two years later, this acquisition was valued at a tenth of the acquisition price. This collapse led to a change in thinking on my part.</p>
<h2>Discover customer obsession</h2>
<p>In the latter part of my career, I shifted my approach from customer focus to customer obsession.  Where before I had focused on satisfying customers, I embraced the challenge of delighting them.  I continued to listen carefully to customers, but more importantly, learned to experiment with a variety of tactics that worked to achieve the holy grail of delighting customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways.  And instead of focusing on competitors, I learned to create all-new categories where there was far less competition. The result was enduring products, companies and brands. Today, Chegg, the textbook rental startup that I was part of, is worth $3 billion and Netflix has invented a new industry, internet TV, that I hope will stand the test of time.</p>
<p>The recognition that your job as product leader is to experiment and invent on behalf of customers — to delight them with products and features they can’t begin to articulate — was a helpful shift in my thinking.  Today, for me, “true north” is not a destination, but rather a magical direction born out of constant experimentation and invention. And on the downside, if you fail to keep getting better, the distance between customer expectation and what your product delivers will widen, resulting in obsolescence.</p>
<h2>How to delight your customers</h2>
<p>In this Customer Obsession talk from ProductTank San Francisco on World Product Day, I outline:</p>
<ul>
<li>The balancing act of delighting customers in hard-to-copy margin-enhancing ways.</li>
<li>How “customer obsession” helped Netflix to create a highly personalized experience, and</li>
<li>The principles of customer obsession through a case study — “Should Netflix send a free trial reminder to its customers at the end of their four-week trial?”</li>
</ul>
<p>Is your product organization “customer obsessed?” Do you go beyond what customers say to measure what they truly value?  Have you learned to double down on delight, forsaking margin for exceptional customer experience?  Do you invent all-new products that are so hard-to-copy, that you spend almost no time focused on competitors? Is your team fully committed to chasing your customers’ insatiable desires, pointing your company towards a “true north” of product, brand and company greatness?</p>
<p>If the answer to any of the above questions is No, then I think you will find my World Product Day talk on Customer Obsession useful.</p>

core/freeform

What good product design looks like – Miguel Fernandez (VP of Product Design, Slack)

10x Product X Design: Product and research team collaboration by Jane Austin

Learnings from London: What is it like to hold Google in your hand?

Learnings from London: How to build a billion dollar app

Product Systems: How to manufacture lightning in a bottle by Oji Udezue

Product management meets UX design by Tanmay Goel, Emi Kwon, Simran Kaur

Designing a sustainable future by Leyla Acaroglu

Making Hard Product Decisions for All the Right Reasons

Product Vision 2020

The Importance of Empathy, By Jack Sheppard

Customer Obsession by Gibson Biddle

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