May, 2018

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Why do we Forget That Product Management is a Tough Career?

Mind the Product

Growing up, I wanted to be an astronaut – or a dinosaur. I think I got closer to being a dinosaur, I certainly did more practice! As an adult, if I could trade careers overnight I’d quite like to be an actor. The challenge of authentically playing different characters in different situations appeals to me, but I know it’s a career that is much harder than it appears.

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Andrew Chen on finding the “fresh powder” in growth

Intercom, Inc.

What do Dropbox, Uber, AngelList, Front, Gusto and Boba Guys have in common? All have benefited from the sage advice of growth expert and Andreessen Horowitz general partner Andrew Chen. Andrew’s been an angel investor and advisor for a slew of name-brand startups; however, he’s most widely known for his invaluable essays on growth. He’s written more than 650 of them over the past decade and has been featured and quoted in The New York Times, Fortune, Wired and Wall Street Journal.

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Stop Looking For Customer Problems

Product Management University

There’s an old saying in sports – winning cures everything. The same could be said for B2B organizations that consistently meet their strategic goals. When organizations are winning, many of their so-called problems fade into the background. Which brings me to an important point that every product management team should consider: If your organization is on a crusade to find and solve customer problems, STOP!

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How to Be a More Agile Product Manager

Clever PM

Due to the unique role that Product Managers play in most organizations, we’re often capable of being the strongest influences on the overall culture of the product development organization and of the company in general. And while there are many companies out there who are truly only interested in giving lip service to the concept […].

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Less Stress, More Success: Accounting Best Practices & Processes for 2025

Speaker: Duke Heninger, Partner and Fractional CFO at Ampleo & Creator of CFO System

Are you ready to elevate your accounting processes for 2025? 🚀 Join us for an exclusive webinar led by Duke Heninger, a seasoned fractional CFO and CPA passionate about transforming back-office operations for finance teams. This session will cover critical best practices and process improvements tailored specifically for accounting professionals.

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ClassPass’ Founder on How Marketplace Startups Can Achieve Product/Market Fit

First Round Review

It's rarely a straight line to product/market fit. Here are ClassPass founder Payal Kadakia's hard-won tips for marketplace startups that helped her guide her company from a near-bust to a $470M game-changer.

Startups 110

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Am I a Product Manager or a Product Owner? Part 2

bpma ProductHub

By Ellen Gottesdiener Part 2: 5 Ways to Untangle the Mess In part 1 of this blog, I outlined the confusion between what a Product Manager does and what a Product Owner does. The difference and overlaps between product management and product ownership work illustrated how activities span both strategic and tactical product management.

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Close.io CEO Steli Efti on the rights and wrongs of lead qualification

Intercom, Inc.

To build a great product, you have to intimately understand the problem it’s built to solve. To build a great business, as Steli Efti has learned, your customers must feel the pain of that problem too. Steli is the CEO of Close.io , an inside sales CRM that helps startups and SMBs generate high-quality leads and close more deals. When he’s not building software, Steli’s sharing content with the wider sales community through the Close.io blog , books on everything from product demos t

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How to Get Roadmap Buy-in: Tell a Good Story

UserVoice

Numbers are great—when the black ones get bigger and the red ones get smaller, it’s always a good thing. And yeah, charts are awesome—arrows pointing up and to the right portend great things in the future, especially when they look like a hockey stick. But it’s hard to make an emotional connection with facts and figures when you’re seeing them in a presentation.

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Product Leadership in Scrum

Roman Pichler

Three Types of Leadership. Scrum is a simple framework with three roles: product owner, development team, and Scrum Master. Each role provides a distinct type of leadership. As the product owner, you lead the product and are responsible for its overall success. The cross-functional development team makes the design and technology decisions; and the Scrum Master guides process and organisational change, as the following picture shows.

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B2B eCommerce, Self-Service Portals, and PIM Trends for 2024

In 2024, B2B customers expect better quality and service with streamlined experiences that match consumer-grade simplicity—no long calls or meetings required. Our B2B eCommerce Trends Report, surveying 400+ B2B professionals in the US and Europe, reveals how eCommerce has become vital to top companies’ strategies. The report shows how leaders are leveraging eCommerce to break data silos, unify channels, and deliver the personalized experiences that customers demand.

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What Blocks our Empathy in the Design Thinking Process?

Mind the Product

Empathy is the foundation of the whole Design Thinking process. Putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes enhances our ability to receive and process information, which helps us understand how other people experience the world. As a product designer, I know that empathy helps me to recognise the difficulties that people face, alongside their needs and desires, and that I can then use that knowledge to design the best solution for their challenges.

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That Which is Urgent is Not Always Important

Clever PM

We’ve all been there — that sudden call from one of your Sales team with a customer “on the hook” but they only need this one more thing to close the deal. Or maybe it’s an escalated issue from your biggest customer that lands in your mailbox with gigantic ALL CAPS AND EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!!! Or worse […].

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Am I a Product Manager or a Product Owner? Part 1

bpma ProductHub

By Ellen Gottesdiener Part 1: Confusion Abounds With the maturing of the software industry and with an overwhelming acceptance of agility, I am still surprised at the inconsistency and overall confusion between what product managers and product owners do. On a panel I participated on this very topic, the presenters had different, sometimes contradictory perspectives.

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The top marketing statistics for 2018 and why they matter

Intercom, Inc.

There are few functions where the phrase “the more things change, the more they stay the same” rings truer than in marketing. For instance, the fundamentals of good marketing haven’t changed: crisp writing, a compelling story, strong brand, and of course, a great product to market. At the end of the day, nothing you do as a marketer will land without those elements; as Copy Hacker’s Joanna Wiebe once told us , “People will not read anything, anywhere that is boring, ever.

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Usage-Based Monetization Musts: A Roadmap for Sustainable Revenue Growth

Speaker: David Warren and Kevin O'Neill Stoll

Transitioning to a usage-based business model offers powerful growth opportunities but comes with unique challenges. How do you validate strategies, reduce risks, and ensure alignment with customer value? Join us for a deep dive into designing effective pilots that test the waters and drive success in usage-based revenue. Discover how to develop a pilot that captures real customer feedback, aligns internal teams with usage metrics, and rethinks sales incentives to prioritize lasting customer eng

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Writing Customer Success Stories Before You Build the Solution

Product Management University

The greatest athletes in every sport have one thing in common – the innate ability to see plays before they happen. If you’re a product manager, imagine how great it would be to envision the ultimate customer success stories before you build the product. If you aspire to be the Michael Jordan, Serena Williams or Wayne Gretzky of product managers, you just have to step outside the metaphorical product box and see the game through the eyes of the customer.

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Understand context and diminish risk: How to build your first Wardley Map with RealtimeBoard

Miro

Understand context and diminish risk: How to build your first Wardley Map with RealtimeBoard Wardley Maps are all about strategy. To be more precise, it’s about building an intuitive and shareable understanding of your context so the strategy you adopt ends up being a good one. All this is especially helpful if you are starting […]. The post Understand context and diminish risk: How to build your first Wardley Map with RealtimeBoard appeared first on RealtimeBoard Blog.

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Product Owner vs Product Manager: Worry About Outcomes not Titles

Mind the Product

Over the past year I’ve worked with hundreds of product managers in dozens of companies, and there’s been one question that has sounded like a persistent drum beat: “ What is the difference between the role of a product owner and a product manager? ”. When confronted with this question, I used to hesitate, because from company to company there are a million things that can affect the roles; the product, larger organization structure, product development process, cultural differences, regional di

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Yes, You DO Need to Do Post-Mortems

UserVoice

Introduction. One of the most important, and often most-overlooked, aspects of adopting a “little-a” agile culture lies in the application of continuous improvement practices. By far the most important of these practices is looking back over past efforts so that we can identify root cause and propose remedial efforts. And while Scrum has this function built in on the team level, the sprint retrospective is.

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Prepare Now: 2025s Must-Know Trends For Product And Data Leaders

Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, Terrence Sheflin, and Mahyar Ghasemali

As we look ahead to 2025, business intelligence and data analytics are set to play pivotal roles in shaping success. Organizations are already starting to face a host of transformative trends as the year comes to a close, including the integration of AI in data analytics, an increased emphasis on real-time data insights, and the growing importance of user experience in BI solutions.

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Customer Love Summit Speaker Series: Katie van Zyl, Director of Product Management at GoDaddy

Alchemer Mobile

Our second annual Customer Love Summit will take place on July 18th, 2018, and registration is now open. Reserve your spot now! If you’re a leader in mobile customer experience, you won’t want to miss out on this year’s premier, intimate mobile event of the summer. Whether you’re in product, marketing, engineering, or other, our world-class speaker lineup will have something for everyone working to make the mobile world a friendlier, more impactful place for all.

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The importance of an effective product marketing strategy

Intercom, Inc.

Despite the mountain of evidence contradicting the mantra of “if you build it, they will come”, it’s still extremely prevalent among product-first companies. Why? First, most founders don’t have a background in either sales or marketing, and even though they’re told to “ start marketing the day you start coding ”, they just don’t know where to begin, or they’re incredibly overconfident.

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Social Media has the “Exact Same Negative Effect on Depression” as Eating Potatoes

Nir Eyal

It feels impossible to tell if the technology our kids use should be celebrated or feared. A few years ago I wrote a book, Hooked, about how technology can be used to change our habits. I intended the book to teach startups how to build healthy habits, but now I’m not so sure. With headlines […]. The post Social Media has the “Exact Same Negative Effect on Depression” as Eating Potatoes appeared first on Nir and Far.

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Our 6 Must Reads For Creating and Accelerating Trust on Teams

First Round Review

Trust is intangible, but foundational to nearly every part of company-building. We've assembled our top posts from leaders who have gotten particularly tactical with fostering trust on their teams.

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The 25 Types of Innovation Dominating R&D Today

Innovation varies widely across sectors and organizations, creating value in diverse forms. Understanding different types is crucial for R&D teams to foster creativity and uncover missed opportunities. This guide explores 25 key types of innovation in management frameworks.

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Building Product in a Post-GDPR World

Mind the Product

It’s GDPR week! Keep Calm and Manage Data Responsibly! I’m not going to go into an exhaustive breakdown of exactly what GDPR is, as there are plenty of other perfectly good posts about that. I’m also going to avoid – wherever possible – the legalese and specific jargon that comes with it. By this point, you’re either familiar with it or you’re in for a nasty shock in the near future!

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Relationships are the Currency of Product Managers

The Product Guy

Guest Post by: Rodhmir Labadie (Mentee, Session 5, The Product Mentor) [Paired with Mentor, Stuart Moore]. The process of taking a product or a feature from idea to execution is a taxing proposition for any team to undertake. Moving from product concepts to execution requires the steady guidance of a product manager to listen and understand the needs and wants of the organization, the teams involved, and the users for whom the product is being built.

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“Product” is More Than Just Development

Clever PM

It’s far too common in the world of Product Management for us to wind up being narrowly focused on the actual product development cycle – define, build, measure, repeat. But there’s far more to building, launching, and maintaining a successful product than just what goes on between Product Management and Development. The best and most […].

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Customer retention is the new conversion

Intercom, Inc.

Convincing potential users to sign up for your product isn’t easy. But what happens next is far more important. The latest batch of billion-dollar companies are built on high customer retention. They help their users be successful, and that means providing great onboarding. At Traction Conference, an event all about how to keep and grow customers and revenue at scale, I explained how to build onboarding based on your customers’ goals, and why when your product improves, your onboardi

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Launching LLM-Based Products: From Concept to Cash in 90 Days

Speaker: Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health and Tony Karrer, CTO at Aggregage

Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health, is here to take us through how he guided his company's recent experience of getting from concept to launch and sales of products within 90 days. In this exclusive webinar, Christophe will cover key aspects of his journey, including: LLM Development & Quick Wins 🤖 Understand how LLMs differ from traditional software, identifying opportunities for rapid development and deployment.

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How Bad is Tech Use for Kids, Really?

Nir Eyal

It feels impossible to tell if the technology our kids use should be celebrated or feared. A few years ago I wrote a book, Hooked, about how technology can be used to change our habits. I intended the book to teach startups how to build healthy habits, but now I’m not so sure. With headlines […] The post How Bad is Tech Use for Kids, Really? appeared first on Nir and Far.

Startups 111
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Pricing Lessons from Working with 30+ Seed and Series A B2B Startups

First Round Review

As CEO of Entrepid Partners and First Round's Sales Expert in Residence, Gaffney works directly with founders and early sales teams to establish go-to-market strategies and growth plans. Here he shares his pricing principles and experiments so early-stage teams can generate foundational revenue.

B2B 111
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How JustGiving Crowdfunding Went From an Idea to £100m in Five Years

Mind the Product

JustGiving’s goal is to grow the world of giving, enabling more money to be raised for good causes through the use of technology. Initially JustGiving supported only registered charities on its website, but the founders’ vision was to support all good causes. In 2012, when I was working as part of the JustGiving team responsible for innovative products and disruptive business models, we decided to test how people could raise money for non-charitable good causes.