Data Driven Product Management

Challenging your assumptions can pay off. This is what UK retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) discovered when they created a digital lab and started applying Lean Startup techniques to their products. At ProductTank February, Hemal Kuntawala (@hemalkuntawala) talked us through some of the specific insights and assumptions they wanted to challenge.  Each assumption is met with a Read more »

Your tests suck.  There, we said it.  Or at least Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) expert Craig Sullivan (@OptimiseOrDie) thinks so.  He’s made just about every mistake in the book with his own tests, and has seen others fall in the same traps over and over. At ProductTank February, Craig gave us a detailed and practical Read more »

As the UK shops itself out of recession, it was more than fitting that February’s ProductTank London was all about product management in commerce: online, offline and mobile.  This month we had three eye-opening talks: CEO at Depop Runar Reistrup (@runarreistrup) talking about mobile design for the real world; “the Malcolm Tucker of testing” Craig Read more »

How do you get users to want to do what you want them to do? No matter how much effort you put into an amazing marketing site, a slick launch campaign or a frictionless user on-boarding flow, you may still end up tearing out your hair about low retention rates and falling user engagement. That’s Read more »

Taking an idea from crazy pub conversations to launch can be a daunting and difficult process. At ProductTank October, Jo Binding, the former General Manager of Strategy & Product Development at BT Sport made a case for using analytics effectively every step of the way. Jo covered off the analytics that were involved in the Read more »

At ProductTank October, Lee Duddell, the Founder & Head of UX at WhatUsersDo, spoke about some of the potential pitfalls of using analytics. He argued that data is often incomplete, and that blindly following data can lead to incremental improvements that may actually hinder progress on your product. What’s more, he demonstrates how it’s easy Read more »

Multi-armed bandit testing involves a statistical problem set-up. The most-used example takes a set of slot machines and a gambler who suspects one machine pays out more or more often than the others.  For every token, they need to decide which slot machine to use in order to maximise winnings from their budget. This set-up Read more »

Everyone knows analytics are important for product managers. But, like lots of things everyone knows, not everyone knows why they are important and in the case of analytics even necessarily what they are. This post is going to look at: What exactly are analytics? Concepts of analytics Implementing analytics Measuring analytics Reporting analytics Analytics and Read more »

We are doing a survey of product managers. The aim is to assemble data on team sizes, compensation, organisation etc. Once the survey is finished at the end of September we will be publishing a blog post on the aggregate information and any trends we spot. We’ll also happily share the full (anonymised) data set Read more »

Introduction Many people know they should be doing experiments and testing their product but when starting out it can be daunting working out where to begin. So, below is my handy guide to experimentation built from scars received on the coal face of experimenting. This post will take you through a birds-eye tour of the Read more »