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,...
View ArticleHow 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...
View ArticleHow 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...
View ArticleIf You Don’t Get This One Thing Right, All Your Product Research and...
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...
View ArticleJust 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...
View ArticleWhat’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...
View ArticleMore 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,...
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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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleAsk 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...
View ArticleKnow 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...
View ArticleThe 14 Most Common Hypothesis Testing Mistakes Product Teams Make (And How to...
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...
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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...
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Putting the 4 Levels of Product Analysis Into Practice: A Halloween-Themed...
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...
View ArticleThe 5 Components of a Good Hypothesis
“My hypothesis is …” These words are becoming more common everyday. Product teams are starting to talk like scientists. Are you? The internet industry is going through a mindset shift. Instead of...
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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,...
View ArticleThe 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...
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How to Estimate the Expected Impact of a Product Change
Your design team is excited about a new signup process. They are convinced it will increase registrations. Your sales team keeps asking for the same feature over and over again. They think it’s...
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Don’t Rely On Confidence Alone
You find yourself in a conference room with your product team. The white board is covered with sketches. You have an idea that everyone is excited about. You mapped it out. You have a plan. Your...
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