Test-n-Tell - tiny apps, Big ideas

  Everyone who has ever tried to create a product has their embarrassing failure story. Here's one of mine.

  Whether we like it or not, we all need to be competition-aware as PMs. Most of us have competitors, and understanding what they do might help us to win in the market.

  Have you ever wished for AI to only answer based on the data you give it? Or maybe you want to turn some of your sources into a real-sounding podcast? This and much more is possible with NotebookLM.

  In this series of posts I will test and tell (see what I did there?) my thoughts on different AI tools available to PMs. And we start from the most recent and exciting - AI agents category.

  The term MVP became as ambiguous as agile or startup. Everyone seems to be building MVPs even though in many cases (most?) it's not an MVP they are building, but the first version of their product, missing the biggest value a good MVP could deliver.

  To make a successful product you not only need to build it, but also position it rightly on the market and convince your customers to try it. Luckily people exist who can help you do that - product marketers.

  Every aspiring product team wants to do discovery, but still, shamefully few do. Why? Often people don't know where to start. Here's a quick guide to starting product discovery practice in your org.

  Welcome to the first chapter of my ongoing series on how to learn product management with the help of generative AI such as ChatGPT. This post is about the product discovery phase where you'll learn how to select the worthy problems to solve, how to conduct user and market research and how to create your product vision and strategy.

  There is a proven way to create successful tech products. Have a deep understanding of your customers and their problems. Find innovative solutions that you can quickly validate. Continue to iterate on the solution until you find the best product-market fit. Grow your business and delight your customers. However, that's not the only way to be successful, you can try something different. You can learn from Evolution.

  Most modern businesses already realised how important data is for their success. Data science is one of the hottest roles in today's job market. Product managers work with data teams daily, however, should a data team itself have a product manager?

  Even though the product operations process is complex and nuanced, it could be logically split into three major stages. Those are not sequential stages and you could be doing all three at the same time. 

  Managing products is not easy. Especially in a growing company. When you need to deliver value to your customers, plan strategically, onboard new colleagues, and do customer research - it could be overwhelming and often could lead to chaos. Hence the role of product ops emerged to take on those challenges and empower product teams.

  A good product management process has stolen a lot from the scientific method. But there is at least one other skill a good product team would want to adopt from science - an informed debate. 

  The previous article described what does it mean to be technical as a PM and how to become one . You don't need to know how to code or have a computer science degree to be a PM. You might just need to learn how your product is being built, learn the language of developers and be mindful about the limits of your knowledge. 

  Multiple times I've seen those terms used interchangeably, even though there are major differences between market and customer research. Not understanding the full complexity of market research might lead to bad product decisions. 

I am gonna tell you a secret. I don't like to do customer interviews. Yes, I know. After some many articles when I say it's the most important part of PMs job - I personally don't like to do them. Until I am actually doing them.

Have you ever wonder why most of the products look quite similar? All mobile phones are just plastic/glass/metal rectangles with a screen on top. All keyboards, however shiny, are qwerty-based. Or even Windows and macOS, despite cosmetic differences, are similar in core design principals. How come everything is so similar?   

I was working on a product vision lately. I was struggling with it and I couldn’t understand why. Problem areas seemed to be obvious, product category and competitors were identifiable so as perfect customers. And yet the overall vision appeared blurry, too generic and well, quite dull.

In journalism, research and police investigations there is a concept of 5 Ws. What is it and how is it relevant to product management?

Recently, the topic of ethics in software product development came into the spotlight. Numerous critical voices challenge tech companies about their motives and the impact their products have on our world. Big boys are the first to be questioned. And rightly so. Top ten tech giants possess enormous power and should be held accountable accordingly. However, ethical product development is the responsibility of every business, not only the most successful ones. In theory that is true, while in practice medium and small companies are often so obsessed with own survival that ethical considerations are being deprioritized. Moreover, there weren't many useful frameworks to judge whether you're building an ethical product. And we cannot do anything in the tech world without a framework...