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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. If

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 specifically

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