A year in review: productboard’s top 10 posts from 2017
At productboard we aim to bake best practices of product management straight into the interface, so you can improve the way you manage your products right out of the box. In the meantime, we’ll continue publishing thoughts and ideas we’ve learned from great product managers here.
Read on for our top posts from 2017! ?
Still prioritizing features in a spreadsheet?
Here’s why that should scare you…
In recent years the pace of the market has accelerated dramatically. With so many APIs, SaaS ecosystems, and cloud platforms to rely on, a digital product that may have taken five years to get off the ground in 2000 can now be brought to life in a matter of months. It means competition is more fierce because formidable new competitors can arrive overnight. Why has product management be so slow to adapt?
What every PM needs to know about user segments
Avoid the myth of the average user…
Your product must meet the needs of some group of users, or else… This may seem obvious, but in practice it’s why many promising products fail. That’s because failing to segment your users is to tacitly accept the myth of the average user — the belief that to successfully prioritize what functionality to build next, you need only build features that address the most frequently voiced needs. Here’s why that’s a recipe for disaster.
Read more… ?
How does Hubert Palan juggle being CEO of productboard and a new father?
On fatherhood and entrepreneurship…
As CEO and co-founder of productboard, how does Hubert Palan manage the company, the product, and his newborn son? Perhaps the answer won’t surprise you: prioritize.
Why is product management hard?
Three pillars product managers should master to prioritize with confidence…
The next time someone snarkily asks whether product managers are really necessary, ask them whether having engineers master these pillars is really the best way to ship excellent products. Then show them what happened when Google decided to get rid of all its product managers in 2001. Needless to say, they were hired back in a hurry.
Demystifying product management
Anand Subramani (Gusto, Dropbox) shares hard-earned product wisdom…
“If as a PM you see yourself as the gatekeeper of good ideas… if your colleagues see product management as a black box… you’ll be missing out.”
How feature voting forums failed us
And how productboard’s Portal fills the void…
Remember the elation when the first feature voting forums arrived on the scene? At long last, product managers could collect feature ideas from users at scale. Anyone could submit an idea, and others in the customer community could participate by upvoting and commenting on the ideas they liked best! It was PM heaven… Then something funny happened.
Read more… ? ? ?
Traxo uses productboard to unite the world’s travel data
productboard helps teams resurface key insights about user needs…
“productboard has helped me focus on what’s important and avoid the rest… When we started out, our product was very feature oriented. Now everything our company does — from sales to marketing, product, to ops and finance — centers on the core user needs we’re addressing.”
Faster horses and the Model T
Flaws in the classic product manager’s adage…
Product managers who rely solely on gut intuition to make product decisions (just to maintain the self-image of a lone wolf product genius) are setting themselves up to waste thousands of hours of combined team effort, developing products and features that no one wants or needs.
Read more… ? ?
Why every product manager should be able to prototype
Capture your vision for the future… and learn from it
“Prototypes are visions of the future — some way of being able to see and experience the future of an idea [where doing so in words would fall short].”
Read more… ✏️
Using product metrics to build the right features in the right way
Avoid the biggest pitfall of using product metrics…
“Focusing your team’s efforts around a high-level business metric like churn is a bit like a general who sends troops into battle after voicing the strategy: ‘Let’s win the war!’”
That just about does it! Have a fantastic holiday and come back refreshed to build game-changing products in 2018. Cheers from team productboard! ??
