Most beta test programs produce a spreadsheet of bug reports and almost nothing else. That’s not a failure of the testers — it’s a failure of design. If the only question your beta test program asks is “did anything break,” you’ll get an answer to that question and nothing about whether the thing you built…
Run a RICE scoring model on your backlog and you’ll get a ranked list, but you won’t get an answer to a different, more useful question: which of these features will make customers feel something, and which will just quietly satisfy an expectation they already had? Teams routinely RICE-score their way to a roadmap full…
Ninety-one percent of companies running a product-led growth motion plan to increase their investment in it this year, and nearly half plan to double it, according to ProductLed’s benchmark survey of 600-plus companies. That is not a startup fad anymore. It is where the budget is going. And yet most “PLG strategies” reviewed at product…
It’s a familiar situation. User research says people want the product to be simpler — fewer options, fewer steps, less to configure. Meanwhile, sales is asking for more configuration options, because the last three deals they almost lost came down to a prospect needing some specific setting that competitors offer, and you don’t. Both groups…
Something broke. Maybe it was a bad deploy that took down part of the product for an hour. Maybe it was a feature that shipped and quietly caused a spike in support tickets for two weeks before anyone connected the dots. Either way, there’s now a meeting on the calendar called “postmortem,” and everyone walking…
Finding entry-level product manager jobs is one of the most common challenges in a PM career transition. Product management is a field where experience is valued above almost everything else, which creates a frustrating catch-22: you need experience to get a PM job, but you need a PM job to get experience. Breaking into product…
Every product manager has been in that meeting. Ten features on the table. Everyone’s got an opinion. The engineering lead wants to pay down tech debt. Sales wants the enterprise dashboard. The CEO just came back from a conference and wants to build an AI feature. And you’re sitting there trying to figure out which…
What’s the actual ask? That question — usually the first one a CFO or COO asks when a PM finishes a product investment pitch — is almost always the moment the room goes quiet. Because most product business cases are built to justify a decision that’s already been made, not to communicate what’s needed and…
What designers actually need from a PM is not more detailed requirements. That’s the misconception behind most of the friction in product manager working with designer relationships. What they need is a clear problem statement, trust that they own the solution space, and early access to constraints — before they’ve done the work that a…
Here’s the reframe that changes how you handle this: how to prioritize when everything is urgent isn’t really a prioritization question at all. “Everything is urgent” is not a prioritization problem. It’s a communication problem that’s been allowed to become a prioritization problem. When every request lands as urgent, it usually means one of two…