Assumption Testing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'

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

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

When a team sets out to develop a product, they generate a series of hypotheses. In my experience, good teams are explicit about these hypotheses and test them before they invest too much time into a particular product plan. However, more often than not, I see that development teams are