Data Driven Product Management

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 »

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 »

Don’t get me wrong, I’m an advocate of data-driven decisions and I prefer my opinions and ideas to be grounded in a robust number backed case. I can have jubilatory moments when analysing figures and seeing the positive impact of what I do, as a product manager. This is also why I continue working out Read more »

When you’re looking for new ideas, look beyond yourself. Collaboration and teamwork is a great way to generate new ideas. A popular way to do this is to brainstorm ideas, then aggregate them. Write a thought, whatever comes into your head, put it on a Post-It note. Now, stop. Let’s put them all together on Read more »

Every time you look behind a truly great product, you find people. The individuals who have created paradigm shifting, legacy leaving products are distinguished not merely by what they’ve done, but also by who they are. Take a famous example. Thomas Edison pioneered the lightbulb, one of the greatest products of all time. He wasn’t Read more »

In the first part of this series, I explained what these buzzword-y “Continuous Delivery” (CD) and “DevOps” things are and started to touch on why you should care. But really, why should you care about these practices? Here’s why continuous delivery is a product manager’s new BFF. Continuous Delivery is Transformative to Businesses The main Read more »

Iwan Roberts (Business analyst, BBC) is part of a relatively small agile team building location services at the BBC, continuously iterating for over a year now. In this ProductTank talk – “Driven By Data” – Iwan gives a whistle-stop tour of how his team has iteratively built a set of operational dashboards to help them Read more »

The specialism of Julia Shalet – a.k.a. The Product Doctor –  is in driving and enabling people-centred product leadership for those working in fast pace environments. She works with clients such as Pearson and Fitbug, enabling their staff to be ‘lean’ in their approach to customer and product development. In this energetic and insightful talk, Read more »

It’s an inarguable fact: Metrics are useful. But they’re missing something—they don’t tell you the whole story. Quantitative metrics can tell you that a problem exists, but they can’t tell you what exactly the problem is or why it exists. Product managers are often tasked with increasing KPIs on their products, but they can’t do Read more »

Jono Alderson describes himself as a closet web developer, turned Technical SEO and analytics geek, and now focuses more on data analytics strategy. The key thing he points out in this talk is that data itself isn’t actually useful at all – it’ frameworks for understanding that data which will drive success. We don’t do Read more »