Mind the Product

JANUARY 24, 2019

15 years ago we founded a product development studio, Mint Digital, and we’ve launched at least 100 MVPs since then. Then we met a man who had developed the technology to personalise marshmallows. This concept split the team. Looking back, this was a bad MVP. We had 12 half-completed new products in development.

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Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

For those who don’t know him, Will has over 10 years of experience in the likes of Yahoo, Digg, Uber, and Stripe, and he’s currently the CTO of Calm , the mindfulness app that helps millions of people to lower their stress levels and sleep better. If you’re a senior engineer and want to further your career, what skills should you develop?

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Technical Review Leadership CTO Coach Weak Development Team 274

Melissa Perri

JULY 14, 2016

When I replay this scene in my head, I can hear the CTO very audibly yelling (slash pleading) with our product team. We had learned so much about what was preventing users from signing up on the site, and it was a lot clearer which direction in which we should be going. BUT we still had to test our ideas. He was on edge.

Product Strategy 304

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Johanna Rothman

AUGUST 11, 2022

Many agile teams and product leaders assume they can make many product decisions on their own. They do have some constraints, such as “this kind of customer” and “these kinds of problems.” Product leaders assume they can plan and replan the product backlog, based on the team's learning.

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The Product Coalition

JUNE 17, 2019

by Sergey Kizayn, CTO, Intetics. The secret to becoming a successful startup lies in knowing your strengths and weaknesses and overcoming all the obstacles you will face along your journey. They know market trends and whether or not your product fits. And if it doesn’t fit, they know how to make it fit.

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Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

In engineering, you want to move fast, ship often and solve real customer problems. It means reducing choices amongst engineering teams and standardizing technology, so our team can spend as much time as possible delivering value to customers. Can you describe our standards technologies?

Research Software 192

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Hutwork

MARCH 9, 2018

Few talk about the silent hero that boosts them to the elite level: consuming the written word. Most interesting are the three product manager archetypes (which one do you fit under?) The Power of the Elastic Product Team—Airbnb’s First PM on How to Build Your Own. 5 Designing Your Product’s Continuous Feedback Loop.

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Mironov Consulting

JUNE 27, 2019

Defining my label carefully, a “product leader” is someone who manages a team of product managers. That maps to titles like Director of Product Management, Group Product Manager, VP of Products, or Chief Product Officer. 1] Designing, Building, and Nurturing a Product Team. 2] Driving Strategy, Tooling and Outcomes. [3]

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The Product Coalition

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

As a Product Manager, you’re a team player who guides product development along its chartered course, but you have to do that without being the literal captain of the ship. Influence without authority is the skill of driving product development and ‘telling people what to do’ without formally being authorized to do so.

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Product Management Product Manager Data Visualization Weak Development Team 182

Roadmunk

SEPTEMBER 21, 2017

I’m constantly consuming articles on product management, product culture, startups and entrepreneurship to bolster my career as a product person and leader. Some sit outside the product domain, but still directly pushed me as a product manager to connect and empathize with other team members. 12 things about product-market fit.

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Mironov Consulting

DECEMBER 31, 2017

I strongly advocate a “portfolio pie” model of prioritization, to avoid putting all of our development eggs into the feature basket. Especially in enterprise/B2B, sales teams may have only a handful of major active accounts, each carrying a lot of revenue. More here.) It certainly feels that way.

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Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 21, 2021

Throughout the year, we’ve talked to business leaders, experts, and pioneers about all kinds of topics: from creating world-class customer experiences to the challenges of running a business during the pandemic, from being an ally and addressing gaps in diversity to building technical leadership careers. Will Larson , CTO of Calm.

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The Product Guy

OCTOBER 11, 2019

A common thing in product management is business leaders (like the head of product or the CTO) not having clear sight of every problem happening with a product or one specific part of a product. The feeling of underinvestment is very common in product teams. Team allocation scenarios. The Problem.

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Sachin Rekhi

JULY 10, 2019

I always love reading each new book the Basecamp team publishes as they are inevitably chock-full of unique perspectives that preach an approach to working better that goes against conventional wisdom and established best practices. Before even considering a project for building in an upcoming cycle, the Basecamp team always shapes the work.

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Weak Development Team Software Review Customer Experience CTO 121

BrainMates

APRIL 30, 2018

A bright and brave cross functional team of panellists were on hand to tackle an imagined (but realistic) Product Management scenario. The panellists were: Mark Cohen, CTO at Domain. So Marie, you’re the chief product officer and you’ve been at the offsite with the exec team recently, where all of this was discussed.

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Bain Public

MAY 29, 2020

MAIN: Developing Entrepreneurship in Quebec. MAIN , also known as Mouvement des accélérateurs d’innovation du Québec, states that their mission is "to improve the cohesion and efficiency of the business incubator and accelerator ecosystem and to increase its impact on the development of entrepreneurship and innovation in Quebec.".

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Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 15, 2018

At Reddit, he led a team of 35 – none of whom knew how to manage other engineers. He had to quickly determine which team members displayed a potential for leadership and teach them the fundamentals of management so they could make new hires and scale – without ruining the culture. That project led to my first cross-functional team.

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Engineering Leadership CTO Coach Feedback Software 141

The Product Coalition

NOVEMBER 27, 2018

you’ll find hundreds of articles, most pointing to the same reasons: No market need Ran out of cash Team problems Pricing/product/business models issues Competition One small problem I have with these reasons. So who is better managed, your CTO (managed by you) or yourself (being managed by the board)? develop a split personality.

Startups 60

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Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 5, 2022

In today’s data-driven SaaS scene, these can affect hundreds of millions of users and cause damage in the billions of dollars, and as compliance frameworks become requirements to do business, businesses are turning to third-party services that can help expedite and facilitate the process. Less than a year later, Drata was launched.

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Reporting Tools Data Visualization Software Review Technical Review 211

Usersnap

JANUARY 12, 2022

In short, the CPO oversees all aspects of a product’s vision, design, and development. They are essential in creating a robust and helpful product that fills a void in the market while addressing customer feedback. However, their (and all product team members’) superpowers and role in SaaS growth is invaluable!

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Research Software Feedback Software Analytic Tools Fractional CTO 52

Modus Create

APRIL 10, 2024

Welcome to Conversations with Chief Innovators , where our CEO Pat Sheridan discusses innovation in business with transformational leaders across industries. In the seventh episode, we bring you Larry Fitzpatrick , Executive Vice President and CTO of OneMain Financial. What was your experience?

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Product Talk

MARCH 1, 2023

I realize that many product people have never worked in a product trio , don’t have access to customers, aren’t given time to test their ideas, and are working in what Marty Cagan calls “features teams” or “delivery teams.” If you missed the first one on product success and team satisfaction , be sure to start there.

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The Product Coalition

OCTOBER 6, 2020

People today consume content through more channels than ever before, and they’re also using media channels to talk about the TV shows and movies they watch. Canvs Founder and CEO, Jared Feldman believes in the importance of understanding how people feel on social media as they consume content.

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Business of Software Conference

MAY 15, 2019

And far from being a company that was going to deliver a whole bunch of customers who were going to be innovative adopters the likes of people who buy Apple products, actually where 3G had to play in the end was with cheap voice for effectively ‘chavs’ is the way they called it. Again pre any sort of touchscreen devices that went consumer.

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Research Software Technology User Testing Fractional CTO 55

Business of Software Conference

FEBRUARY 16, 2021

So, this was focused on software developers, specifically, for dotnet software developers, this very small ad network, I ran those ad networks for a couple years, and realized that that was a terrible business. And I was a software developer before. And then in 2010, we got our first customer. 2:43 Mark: Yeah.

Feedback Software 59

Feedback Software Weak Development Team Customer Communications Customer Experience 59

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 11, 2020

For example, webcams with built-in facial detection sometimes don’t detect people with darker skin , because they were only tested on people with lighter skin. They equate “white” with “good” and “black” with “bad.”. The letter got resounding support, including a rousing endorsement from our co-founder and CTO, Ciaran Lee.

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Technical Review Software Review Systems Review Fractional CTO 289

UX Studio: Product Management

NOVEMBER 8, 2021

Our user experience professionals have already analyzed the expertise of dozens of design agencies in San Francisco, New York, Berlin, London, to name a few. Our independent research ranks design companies based on their portfolio, skills, capabilities, and pricing. Award-winning global user experience design company.

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Research Software User Testing Technical Review Product Research 77

Mironov Consulting

SEPTEMBER 14, 2020

Over the last three decades, across 10 full-time jobs and 150 consulting clients, I’ve headed up product teams 18 times (mostly as interim VP ) and helped another dozen companies choose their Head of Product. They don’t value experience running product management teams , instead overweighting narrow technical or market segment familiarity.

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Reporting Tools Analytic Tools Onboarding KPIs Data Visualization 145

The Accidental Product Manager

MARCH 23, 2020

What I did need to do was to find out what their product development definition was and launch a new product. The product was a very sophisticated collection of 5 pieces of hardware and 15 pieces of off-the-shelf software that all had to be custom configured in order to create a super secure system. We all got along very well.

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Mironov Consulting

APRIL 15, 2023

 One group (sales, implementation/customer success, professional services, account-based marketing) is trained and paid and rewarded to focus on one customer at a time , with current-quarter timelines.  In aggregate, how many different customers will use the same exact bits to do X?  What Get it done, and move on.

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Software Review Customer Experience User Testing Technical Review 125

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 14, 2018

Looking for an example of a happy, high performing product team? I hosted Laura on our podcast to learn everything from why assembling a great product team is like pulling off a heist, to tips for improving collaboration and marrying business needs with user goals. Balancing business goals with user needs. Laura: Exactly.

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Weak Development Team CTO Coach Onboarding KPIs Fractional CTO 190

The Product Coalition

JULY 17, 2018

to find this year’s top app development agencies. After reading a bunch of content from other app development professionals, journalists, tech bloggers and the like, we realized that there are many good companies out there, and that everyone has a different favorite. It develops for Android and iOS, but also for the web.

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Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 13, 2019

In a recent talk at UX London , I discussed some lessons learned while growing the design team at Intercom, reflecting on the technology industry’s obsession with tools, and pointed out how our sense of tools as objects or apps blinds us to the reality that the processes we adopt and develop are also, in effect, tools.

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Reporting Tools Research Software Feedback Software Weak Development Team 223

The Product Coalition

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

The company decided to pivot, and focus on developing what they initially thought of as a more convenient tool for internal business communication. MetaLab reworked the company’s website and app, redesigned its logo, and created most of what users see when they interact with the messaging tool today.

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Intercom, Inc.

JULY 9, 2020

And I’m a writer of a newsletter called Tech Bound, in which I hone in on marketing strategies and customer acquisition. And I put together these horrible, bad websites – I’m lucky there’s no evidence of them anymore. Atlassian does not have an outbound sales team. Kevin: Yeah, that’s true.

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Analytic Tools Research Software Data Visualization Technical Review 199

Atomic Spin PM

JANUARY 9, 2019

Finding the right custom software development firm for your project is a tough job. Your team also needs good project management, experienced product development, great people skills, and more. Your team also needs good project management, experienced product development, great people skills, and more.

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The Product Coalition

APRIL 29, 2020

The needs of the users evolve, business stakes evolve, the market evolves and everything happens very fast. They also know how to motivate the team and help them adapt and look for better ways to build the product. The success depended on us being a team way more than on each of us being a great dancer. The same goes for PMs.

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