This is a talk I gave summarizing what I consider to be the best practices for driving growth (often called “Growth Hacking”) based on my own experience leading growth in Gmail and on examples from hyper-growth companies like Facebook, AirBnB, and Instagram. Some of the things I touch on: Finding a North Star and/or One …
Why I Quit Product Roadmaps Over the years I created my fair share of product strategies, product roadmaps and project gantts. I don’t do them anymore. I found a better alternative which I’ll explain below. First, here’s what I used to do: This form of planning is a ton of work — just getting all stakeholders to …
Why you should stop using product roadmaps and try the GIST Framework Read More »
Last April mobile event discovery startup, Fever, invited me to help with its growth initiative. Fever helps users discover and book events — from parties to fashion, food and fitness. The service gained traction in Madrid, New York, London and other cities, generating over 3 million bookings last year, and reaching a unique monthly audience of over …
Finding and building the next big idea is the holy grail of any tech company. Unfortunately the statistics are against us: when subjected to A/B testing most ideas turn out to produce no impact or even negative impact, and at least one analysis suggests that you need 3000 raw ideas to produce one commercial success. …
The Impact/Effort matrix is a classic product managment tool, helping to prioritize product ideas. See why often it doesn’t work correctly and how to fix.
In tech we have huge bias for execution – building things and launching them fast and with the right quality. A million underwhelming launches later, we now know we should focus on something else: Learning — systematically discovering the right product, market and business model. All execution and no learning exposes you to launching a great product …
Building your project for learning AND execution Read More »
The free and powerful tool statisticians love Data is now the lifeblood of any successful business. In this short article I’ll try to show how you can do powerful data analysis quickly and with relatively low effort using the open-source R programming language. Spreadsheets are nice, but R will take your data analysis skills to …
So you’re facing the audience and getting ready to present. Everyone’s attention is on you. What do you do? Here’s what I find works for me: Be Interesting — The mere fact that your audience is physically there in the room does not mean you have their undivided attention. In fact you can bet it’s divided as …
There’s something inherently problematic about the way we plan our products and services. An uncomfortable truth that’s rarely stated. David M. Upton and Bradley R. Staats wrote the following on IT projects: “The fundamental problem with these systems is that for the most part, they’re constructed using what programmer and open source champion Eric Raymond …
And Why It Matters So Much for Your Product René Magritte Value for user (as opposed to value of a user) is a critically important product concept. Arguably it’s at the bottom of product/market fit, product design, growth, pricing, marketing, sales, customer satisfaction… Few things help products and services succeed more than injecting them with lots …