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Mind the Product

#mtpcon

When your product is not THE product by Emily Tate at #mtpcon London 2025

Podcast

How and when to sunset features – Roni Ben Aharon (CPO, Craft.io, Booking.com, Wix)

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

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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

Martin Eriksson has 25+ years experience building world-class online products in both corporate and start-up environments for global brands such as Monster, Financial Times, Huddle, and Covestor. He is the Founder of ProductTank, the Co-Founder and Curator of Mind the Product, and a Product Partner at leading venture capital fund EQT Ventures. He is also the author of the best-seller Product Leadership, How Top Product Leaders Launch Great Products and Build Successful Teams (O'Reilly, 2017).

Martin Eriksson

History is littered with companies who missed the boat on big new innovations and optimised their way to obsolescence &#8211; from Kodak inventing the digital camera but shelving it for fear of cannibalising their film revenue, to Swiss watchmakers inventing the quartz watch movement but letting the Japanese eat their market with it. <a href="http://twitter.com/kennethn" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ken Norton</a> from Google Ventures joined us at Mind that Product 2015 and shared what he thinks underlies this phenomenon.
It&#8217;s a story about how the human instinct for loss aversion cripples companies&#8217; abilities to make good decisions. Imagine two projects identical in scope and effort, but the first project looks like a sure thing &#8211; 99% chance of delivering $1 million to the bottom line, while the second project looks far riskier &#8211; 1% chance of delivering $1 billion to the bottom line. Which would you choose? Which would your company choose? <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/10percent.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-7601" src="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/10percent-300x169.png" alt="10percent" width="300" height="169" srcset="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/10percent-300x169.png 300w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/10percent-285x160.png 285w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/10percent-570x320.png 570w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/10percent.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a>Decision Theory tells us that option 2 is actually far more valuable &#8211; a 1% chance at $1 billion is still worth $10 million, yet most companies will choose the sure thing every time.
As Alphabet CEO Larry Page says, “It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time. Especially in technology, where you know there’s going to be non-incremental change.”
So how do we stop taking the obvious path, the safe path, the 10% path? The key is to stop thinking about incremental improvements and start thinking about 10x improvements. Just adding a zero, an order of magnitude, forces you to challenge your assumptions and approach the problem from a different angle, but this also frees you up to new ideas and new solutions.
Thinking 10x requires a whole new mentality and a whole new way of working. The irony is small startups think only big companies like Google with cash to burn can work this way &#8211; and big companies think only small risk-taking startups can work this way &#8211; but in this talk Ken outlines eight things every company can do to start organising itself to work this way.
And while not everyone is aiming to land on the moon, and not everyone works for Google or SpaceX, that doesn’t mean you can’t use moonshot thinking. If you set crazy ambitious goals and miss them, you’ve probably still achieved something remarkable.
Watch this illuminating and insightful talk and then <a href="http://ctt.ec/Ouff0" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">share it with your colleagues</a> &#8211; are you thinking 10x? Or will you iterate yourself to obsolence?
Want more inspirational talks like this? Make sure not to miss our <a href="http://mtpcon.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">upcoming Mind the Product Conferences</a> in <a href="http://mtpcon.com/london/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">London</a> and <a href="http://mtpcon.com/sf/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">San Francisco</a>!

core/freeform

How to lead data-centric product teams: Jon Mora (Chief AI Officer, Zefr)

How to be a better data-driven product manager

User insights for product decisions by Cris Valerio

Data scaling for startups by Crystal Widjaja

Make Better Product Decisions by Using Quantitative and Qualitative Data, by Brian Tran

Testing Business Ideas, by David Bland

Developing a Data-Driven Culture at Dow Jones, By Helen Hewitt

When A/B Tests Aren’t Enough, By Scott Castle

Using Data to Build a Brand, by Abba Newberry

Socially Preferable by Nathan Kinch

10x Not 10%, Product Management by Orders of Magnitude by Ken Norton

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