Product Planning

Is price segmentation fair? One of the most valuable levers a company has when pricing its products is charging different customers different prices, also known as price segmentation. In essence, a company estimates a buyer’s willingness to pay and does its best to charge as close to that as possible. Of course, there is no Read more »

It wasn’t too long ago that designers and developers were disciples of strictly separate crafts – but today, someone who can do both well is quickly labelled a “unicorn”, and sought after by many a unicorn-thirsty start-up. I believe the same synthesis of skill sets is occurring between marketers and product managers, but all too Read more »

A few weeks ago, I invited Mind the Product readers to take part in a brief survey with a simple goal: to identify the biggest challenges product managers face in their role. I’m sincerely grateful to the 47 of you who provided your thoughts, many of which were detailed and insightful in their own right. Read more »

How can a product manager make effective decisions about the direction of their product? How do they adequately weigh up all the variables to select the best solution from the available options?  And how do they make sure that any investment will adequately consider future movements of both the market and the competition? The pressure Read more »

When you launch a product, you rarely ever run just a single customer test of the capabilities and features – it tends to be a series of tests that follow each other (much like Stage-Gate for the development of new products). This “gated” approach allows you to balance the risks of widening your audience against Read more »

One of the most important responsibilities of a product manager is planning the order of features that the dev team should work on. This need to prioritise comes from a very basic constraint – a lack of resource. In a fast-moving business environment – and especially in a start-up – product changes should deliver the most Read more »

There are few relationships as deep and passionate as that between a start-up founder and their product. Your product will dominate your thoughts all day and even through the night from time to time. You’ll ask yourself questions like how can I improve my product, how can I make people buy it, is it the Read more »

Getting to product/market fit is “the only thing that matters” to start-ups, according to Netscape co-founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. The principle is that a product should “fit” the needs of a market for the company to scale and be successful. But how can this be achieved if some signs point towards your firm Read more »

Customer retention is like dating. You don’t interact with your significant other the same way on your first date as you do on your 50th or 200th date. Similarly, giving a customer a great experience on day one isn’t going to be the same as on day 50. In order to boost retention numbers and Read more »

How do you get actionable value from a conference like Mind the Product? Too often that post-conference buzz dissipates into tactical priorities and before you know it, weeks have gone by and you’ve forgotten the items you wanted to follow up on or discuss more with your team. This is a story of how the Read more »