Data Driven Product Management

Emer Kirrane has had the benefit of working in everything from startups to big enterprises, but mostly she has experience with web analytics, and reasonably clear-cut funnels. Having worked on an analytics product, she had the luxury of using the tool she was optimising for her customers, as well as direct access to the developers who could Read more »

Reid Hoffman once remarked, “As the networked age has increased the competitive importance of speed, the key secret is now scaling up at speed.” In other words, the internet has enabled consumers to rapidly and easily access and assess new technologies that in turn become exponentially more valuable via network effects. It’s therefore more important Read more »

In our previous post, we shared three stories of surprising user growth at Mail.Ru – the curious circumstances that led us to gain (or, in one case, lose!) users, how we discovered the root causes, and what we learned about our customers in the process. For the most part, those tales were about how we Read more »

As product managers, we are used to dealing with users: communicating with them, trying to understand their needs, showing them product ideas and getting their feedback. That’s at the core of what we believe product management basically is. We use several tools like user stories and personas, surveys and usability tests, A/B tests and experiments, Read more »

History is littered with companies who missed the boat on big new innovations and optimised their way to obsolescence – 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. Ken Norton Read more »

Lean UX and Lean product design came about about because it is really hard to work out what customers actually want. This is especially true for digital products, as the field is still really just getting started. At it’s core, Lean is about finding better ways to build products with a higher rate of success. Read more »

It’s fashionable to characterize software product leaders as magically prescient. Steve Jobs famously brushed aside customer feedback; he “just knew” how to build software products people would love. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey is similarly clairvoyant according to popular myth, as is Zuck. And so on. But even the greatest product managers know the reality of great Read more »

You need to set your team’s OKRs (objectives and key results) for the next quarter. What should go in there? What shouldn’t? What are you going to focus on? Here’s a quick look behind the curtain at what we’ve learned while setting them and making it effective at YPlan. Read more »

We spend a lot of time and effort avoiding conflict but inevitably as product managers and designers we engage in conflict on a regular basis, whether it’s dealing with other teams, giving constructive criticism or simply while engaging divergent points of view. As the leader of user experience at Netflix and now Spotify, Rochelle King Read more »

Let me get this out of the way: I love Kanban. And this isn’t for any of the usual reasons, such as because it’s a visual management tool, or because it enhances work in progress control, or even because it’s self-managed. I love Kanban because it allows me to not have project management in my product team. Read more »