Insights and advice from the deeper layers of product leadership
As a product leader, your role entails much more than leading the product itself. It often involves complex decision-making – and many decisions that you can’t necessarily make on your own. Here is a simple tool that will help you create clarity and lead to alignment and better decisions.
OKRs are an amazing tool to drive business success. Starting with OKRs is easy. Doing it right is not necessarily so, especially with product OKRs that are a unique beast. Here are a few common mistakes to avoid.
Sometimes your competitors are not the usual suspects. They might not be the products that appear exactly in your category, and honestly, they might not be products at all. Here are six categories of competition that you must be aware of.
Most of us try to avoid arguments with our peers. We have so many of them regardless. However, provoking productive disagreements is a key leadership skill you want to master. Here is how fostering healthy debates is essential for effective leadership and better outcomes. Yes, you want people to argue with you.
When you start selling your product, you feel great, but that doesn’t last for too long. At some point, the results you expected and even produced in the past aren’t replicating. You add features, you replace salespeople, but it doesn’t help. You blame the market, but often that’s just overlooking the real problem. A product strategy is often the missing link that would convert your efforts into actual revenue.
A good product strategy is something every company needs. When VCs and customers aren’t throwing money at whatever you tell them, it becomes a critical tool. When you have fewer employees than you need, even more so. Here is how a product strategy can help you create business results, even when the market is not in your favor.
Leadership without authority is product management 101. You must master it to succeed, in most cases with developers. But as a product executive, you must take it to the next level – and this time use it with the entire management team.
There is a perception that great salespeople can sell anything to anyone. They might, occasionally, but do you really want your success to depend on that? Here is what it takes to help them succeed consistently and at scale.
Real invention is hard, that’s why real innovation is hard. Evolution is much easier than revolution. But to truly solve customers’ problems, founders and product leaders must think beyond what they already know about the product. Here are 3 methods to do so.
We all want maximum value for minimum effort or cost. But which one is more important? In times of an economic downturn, it is very tempting to offer less for lower prices. But is it really what your customers want? Here’s how to look at it in order to make the right decision for your customers.
Your product might be awesome, but if there is no significant need on the other side, it wouldn’t succeed. A need is more than a general desire, and you should trust your customers’ actions more than their words. Here is what to look for.
In the journey to product-market fit many companies take a giant leap of faith in how important and prevalent the problem they are solving is. That’s the #1 reason for startup failure. To make sure it doesn’t happen to you, you must look at your customers for what they are and not for what you want them to be.
