All Articles

How To Make Better Product Decisions

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. "The remarkable thing about your mental life is that you are rarely ever stumped.”  - Daniel Kahneman It's Thursday morning. You settle into your office chair, you crack open your laptop, you take a deep

Start An Idea Journal

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. I have a friend (a skier) who decided that snowboarding needed to be more like skiing. He thought that snowboarding looked fun, but he didn't want to give up the precision of two skis. Being an

Stop Asking "Whether or Not" Questions

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. Recently during lunch, our Director of Sales mentioned that one of our customer's was at risk because we didn't support a specific feature. He asked if we were going to build it. He argued,

Be Prepared To Be Wrong

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. As startup founders, product managers, designers, it's often easy for us to come up with all the answers. Should we add this feature? Will users take this action? Will changing this copy increase conversions? And of

Setting Product Goals

Each quarter, I set goals for my team. I start by asking, what's the most important thing we can accomplish this quarter that would create the most value for the business. Q3 will be my fourth quarter with my current company and once again our goals this coming

Google Reader Is Going Away On Monday, Don't Let Product Talk Go With It

Dear Readers, Let's cut to the chase. There are several hundred of you who are still using Google Reader to read Product Talk. I know that life is busy. There aren't enough hours in the day. And, of course, you'll get to it later.

Grinding It Out

As I mentioned last week, I'm working with a design intern this summer. We were talking about the over all design process, when I argued, when you get to the ideation stage you have to grind it out. I like this metaphor. You can't just have

Introducing My Intern to Interaction Design Is Fun

I'm working with a design intern this summer. It's a lot of fun. She doesn't have a design background. She's right out of college, a dual major in Linguistics and Brain and Cognitive Science. She didn't even know what interaction

Read Lean Analytics

If you haven't read Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz, stop reading this blog post and go pick up a copy. No really. It's that good. For those of you who didn't stop reading to go buy the book, I'll

It's Not Enough To Know What To Measure, You Also Need to Get The Time Increment Right

Do you know how much money you've made over your entire lifetime? Probably not. Or how many miles you've ran since the day you were born? Maybe. If you aren't a runner. I can only think of one person who might know the answers

How Do You Measure Success?

Now that I've told you to measure what matters, let's talk about what that means. A good place to start is by asking, what does success look like? It varies with every product. Let's look at a few examples: An e-commerce site. When I

Measure What Matters

I met with a designer yesterday who shared with me that she wants to learn user experience design and asked for my advice. I asked her what she was reading and if she had joined any local groups. What had she found useful so far? She was reading Alan Cooper.

5 Steps For How To Develop Empathy

Empathy made my list of Top 7 Traits of a Good Product Manager. So let's take a look at what it is and how to develop it. As we learned in that article, empathy is the ability to feel another person's feelings. It is often confused

The 7 Core Traits of a Good Product Manager

What makes a good product manager? I've been obsessed with this question. It's why I started this blog. As a practitioner, I want to master my craft. As a consultant and coach, I want to help you master your craft. But how do we do that

What We Can Learn From Facebook About Managing Change

Does this sound familiar? You spend weeks researching a problem. Your team whiteboards multiple solutions. You user test each one. You build the best one. And despite great feedback from your users along the way, when you finally release, all you get are complaints. Change Is Hard The reality is,

How to Write Product Requirements Iteratively

You have an idea. You write it down. Maybe you sketch it on a white board. You talk to some engineers. You write user stories. And away you go. You start building. That sounds right. Isn't that what we are all doing? It's what many of

Build Knowledge by Expanding on Previous Hypotheses

In the last post we ended by concluding that the results of many A/B tests lead to further questions. This is a good thing. Let's take a look at how you can string A/B tests together to build up a knowledge base over time. Let'

How To Run an A/B Test

Now that you are measuring open, click, and conversion rates for your emails, it's time to look at how to improve them. Let's talk about A/B testing, sometimes called split testing. Far too many people hear A/B testing and think button colors and small

Measuring The Success Of Product Emails

We've discussed why you should send product emails, how you can design emails to convert, and how you can ensure your emails get delivered. Today, we'll look at what you can expect from your product emails. Understanding Open Rates Open rate = the # of people who opened

The Awful World of Email Deliverability

It's not enough to just design a good email template. You also have to put in the work to make sure your email gets delivered. Fortunately, there are a lot of great services to help make this happen. Understand Email Deliverability First, let's go over how

Designing Product Emails That Convert

We've already established that sending product emails is absolutely necessary. So let's take a look at how to design product emails that convert. After all, ineffective product emails aren't much better than not sending product emails at all. Start With a Great Template I

Are you sending enough email to your users?

I know. Email is dead. Everyone is Facebook messaging, texting, and tweeting instead. So why am I asking about email? Because when it comes to products, email is far from dead. I'm not going to beat a dead horse. Lots of people have written about this. Instead, I&

Is This a Dialogue Or a Discussion?

Have you ever been in a brainstorming meeting where the group gets stuck on one idea? They just want to run with it at the exclusion of all else. If your goal is to generate a lot of ideas, this can be pretty frustrating. But what about the opposite? You&

Weekend Reading: A/B Testing Is Hard, To Pivot Or Not, And More

Each week, I read dozens of blogs, countless articles from my Twitter stream, and one or two books. In Weekend Reading, I highlight the best, as it applies to developing great products. A Personal Approach To Organizational Time Management by Peter Bregman "choosing what we are going to ignore

How To Find Common Ground When Engineers Don't Like Features

Have you ever found yourself in an argument with an engineer about the value of a feature? Take a look at the following exchange: Engineer: I don't think we should let companies message candidates who haven't applied for their jobs. Product Manager: How come? Engineer: It