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The Power of Gratitude

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Good food? Gratitude? Friends and family? Yes, please. A few years ago I decided I didn’t want gratitude to be a once-a-year holiday. Instead I wanted to develop a daily habit. So I read about gratitude journals and tried to keep one.

What to Do When You Don't Have Enough Traffic To A/B Test

You’ve read the Lean Startup. You’ve drank the Kool-Aid. You’re ready to start experimenting. There’s only one problem. You don’t have any web traffic. If the only tool in your toolbox is A/B testing, then this might be a problem. Fortunately, there are

The 5 Components of a Good Hypothesis

Update: I've since revised this hypothesis format. You can find the most current version in this article: * How to Improve Your Experiment Design (And Build Trust in Your Product Experiments) “My hypothesis is …” These words are becoming more common everyday. Product teams are starting to talk like scientists.

Putting the 4 Levels of Product Analysis Into Practice: A Halloween-Themed Example

It’s Halloween week! The pumpkins are carved, the candy bowl is full, and the neighborhood is about to be crawling with princesses, ninja turtles, and pirates. You’ve only got one last thing to do before the fun begins. You promised your neighbors hot apple cider - with rum, of

Hypothesis Testing Mistake #1: Not Knowing What You Want To Learn

Have you ran an experiment in the past day, week, month? Can you clearly articulate your hypothesis? Do you know under which conditions your hypothesis will pass or fail? Do you know how to interpret the data in a way that drives successful product decisions? Many of us are new

The 14 Most Common Hypothesis Testing Mistakes Product Teams Make (And How to Avoid Them)

I’ve been working with a product team on how to get better at hypothesis testing. It’s a lot of fun. They were introduced to dual-track Agile by Marty Cagan and are doing a great job of putting it into practice. As they explore how to support backlog

Know Who You Are Building For and Why

It’s easy to be fooled by the Facebooks and the Googles of the world. Everyone uses their products. They make it easy to rationalize why everyone will use your product. But when you draw this conclusion, you skip right from A to Z, ignoring all the steps they took

Ask About the Past Rather Than the Future

At SXSW this year, I met a startup founder, a former fitness trainer, who was about to launch an online business offering personalized gym workouts. I liked that he had first-hand experience as a personal trainer and wasn’t just a gym rat. But I was surprised when he

The Dangers of Thinking of Products as Features

It’s easy to spend the majority of your time talking about features. You track features in your backlog. You schedule features on your roadmap. Your customers request features. Your sales team complaints about missing features. Almost everyone thinks of products as features. But if you want to build better

The Ethics of the Data We Collect

Do you remember the uproar about cookies in the late 90s? I don’t mean the sugar-filled kind. I’m talking about web cookies - the bite-sized bits of information that your browser stores locally so that when you return to a website it already knows who you are.

Moving Beyond Vanity Metrics: An In-Depth Case Study

It’s one thing to read The Lean Startup and Lean Analytics. It’s another thing entirely to put these principles into practice. It can be a challenge to go from theory to practice. Sure, you might know that vanity metrics should be a thing of the past. But what

More on the Facebook Social Contagion Study

There are thousands of news stories every day. More than any news publication or news hour could possibly cover. Car crashes, robberies, heroic feats, international skirmishes, sporting events, political battles, traffic jams, fires, weather reports, personal interest stories. The list is infinite. Every day, editors curate which stories are worthy

What's the Controversy Over the Facebook Social Contagion Study?

A lot of people are up in arms about a research study that was published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). I’m talking about the Facebook social contagion study. But Facebook didn’t do anything wrong. And neither did PNAS by

Just Enough Statistics to Get the Product Job Done

Math is hard. I get it. Many of us continue to suffer from the false belief that we are incapable of doing math. I’m going to leave that alone, as this is a product blog and not a blog about the sad state of K-12 education or more

If You Don’t Get This One Thing Right, All Your Product Research and Experiments Won’t Matter.

The report is wrong. This was the last thing I wanted to hear. It was March or April of 2013. We had launched Explore at AfterCollege a couple of months earlier. In the past week, we had circulated and celebrated a report that indicated that Explore (our new product) was

How to Cultivate Curiosity and Build Better Products

Imagine you are sitting in a meeting. You are in the middle of a heated debate with your head of sales. A customer is adamant they need a feature in order to renew. It’s a big account. The sales team needs the renewal to hit their quarter goal. You

How to Develop Product Expertise

How do you evaluate how someone will contribute to a product team? How do you develop your own skills to ensure that you are contributing the most to your product team? Whether you are looking to hire someone or you are looking to improve your own skills, I see people

The Challenges of Releasing Early and Often

Have you ever rolled out a major product change while one of your sales reps was demo’ing your product to a prospect? I have. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t a small change. It was a new home page, completely new positioning, new branding. A whole new identity.

Drop Feature-Based Product Roadmaps

When I work on a product, I think about it all day long. I obsess over it. I love exploring the long view. What will this product look like next year? Five years from now? Ten years from now? I love the challenge of identifying the very next step on

You Already Know To Begin With The End In Mind. But Do You?

“It sounds like you need to define what success looks like.” This was such a simple statement. And yet, it had a profound impact on me. I was in my early days at Affinity Circles, leading our product team, and struggling with too many competing priorities. I was wasting time

Practice Defining Your MVP

Suppose you are building eVite. Or Facebook Events. Or whatever your favorite event site is. And you need to define your MVP. How would you think about it? Some of you might already be jumping right in. You are thinking you’ll need: * a basic event listing * the ability to

How You Build Matters. Finding Your MVP.

The MVP. The minimum viable product. The most misunderstood concept in the world of Lean startups. And one of the most critical to get right. Why Time To Build Doesn’t Matter In this post about prioritizing, I argue that time to build shouldn’t be taken into consideration when

The Simplest (and Most Important) Question You Face as a Product Leader

What should you build next? This is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as a product manager. If you work in an Agile environment, you’ll make it sprint after sprint. Much of your success will depend on these decisions. Don’t Do What Most People Do

Why Testing Everything Doesn't Work

Please stop throwing spaghetti at the wall. It doesn’t work. I know you can launch a landing page in five minutes. I know it’s easy to toss up a quick A/B test. And I know how easy it is to chat with the 3 people sitting next

How We Used Kindling at AfterCollege to Engage Everyone in Idea Generation

It’s easy to talk about idea management. It’s much harder to do it in practice. Including everyone in idea generation in a way that is productive takes effort. Collecting feedback on each idea can be tedious. But we know involving everyone in idea evaluation leads to better outcomes.