• What Sam Walton Can Teach Us About Researching Your Competition

    What Sam Walton Can Teach Us About Researching Your Competition

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    You’ve been building your product business for months (or years) and you can’t help but ask yourself the following questions over and over again. These feelings are common for those involved with building product businesses.  When I’m focusing on strategy for my product company, I can’t help but feel that I’m reinventing the wheel at…

  • Is Your Company Ready For a Product Manager?

    Is Your Company Ready For a Product Manager?

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    Your product company has some traction (perhaps even some paying customers), but otherwise you feel stuck.  Whenever you task someone with figuring out why, it always seems to fall down the list and you wind up in the same spot you were in before.  Similar symptoms may include: If this is happening to you, then…

  • What Planet Fitness Did to Improve Their Customer Experience

    What Planet Fitness Did to Improve Their Customer Experience

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    You’ve been building your product business for a while now, but something is missing.   Has your product experienced either of the following? If so, you may be lacking in user experience (UX), customer experience (CX) or both. Many product companies don’t build their business to provide an experience – they do it to solve a…

  • Is It a Bug or a Feature?

    Is It a Bug or a Feature?

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    That’s not a feature request, that’s a bug! Your support team thinks it’s a bug.  Your engineering team thinks it’s a feature request.  Who’s right? Well ultimately the customer, but the point is that this dialogue happens at a lot of product companies and it’s a symptom of a larger problem. This in-fighting happens due…

  • Five (More) Excellent Questions Product Managers Should Ask Customers

    Five (More) Excellent Questions Product Managers Should Ask Customers

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    One of my more popular blog articles from last year was about top questions that product managers should ask customers.  (More on that here.)  So I thought I’d write an update to that article on what I’ve learned since then and share a few other great questions product managers should be asking on a regular…

  • Overcoming Market Risk for your Product Business

    Overcoming Market Risk for your Product Business

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    Whenever we are working on building a new product business there is always risk.  The two most common categories are technology risk and market risk. Technology risk refers to whether or not is it possible to build our solution.  Market risk depends on whether or not anyone wants to buy what we’ve built.   I’ve said…

  • How to Know if a Product-led Growth Strategy is Right for Your Product

    How to Know if a Product-led Growth Strategy is Right for Your Product

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    Since becoming popularized within the past few years, product-led growth (or PLG for short) has been popping up everywhere.  I want to talk more about what it is, and more importantly, whether or not you and your product could stand to benefit from it. What is product-led growth? Product-led growth is a go-to-market strategy that…

  • Using Market Share as a Strategy for Greater Profits

    Using Market Share as a Strategy for Greater Profits

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    You’ve determined the appropriate product-market fit, created a product that solves an unmet need for consumers, and launched it with great fanfare.  Now is the time to pivot to growing your company. Focusing on increased sales is an obvious benchmark for measuring profits, but it’s not the only path to growth.  One of the most…

  • It’s not alpha or beta.  It’s the product.

    It’s not alpha or beta. It’s the product.

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    Is my product in the alpha or beta stage?  I get this question often and my answer is always the same – neither.  Your product is always in production. I want to share a few reasons with you as to why I feel this is so important.  A beta will slow you down Stop slowing…

  • Why You Should Resist the Urge to Build Out Your Product

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    There’s a lot to get excited about when starting a new product business.  Many people get excited about all the amazing features they are going to build into their new awesome product.  Unfortunately, this hype is really just a distraction from the goal we should be focusing on – finding product-market fit.  I want to…