'Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.' - David Ogilvy
Sharing something a little different today: I built a product! It’s called Side Hustle Stack: a directory of platform-based work opportunities. Check it out!
Chief product officer is becoming one of the tech world’s most influential positions. According to our recent study, almost a quarter of product teams now report into a chief product officer (CPO), up from only 7% last year. 11-billion-dollar unicorn Okta poached a longtime Google executive to be its new CPO; Disney hired a Goldman exec as VP of product to guide its newest streaming offering; and Tinder nabbed a Facebook veteran to guide its rapidly expanding dating app. One of the world’s most powerful products, Facebook itself, lost its CPO Chris Cox earlier this year and the heads of its main products will now be reporting directly to Zuck himself.
Some of us in product take it for granted that a product-led approach is the way to operate. However, all too often our stakeholders – sales, marketing, our boss’s boss, even our own team – may need some convincing.
How to build a start-up or product MVP without coding
Much of modern problems in software development have actually been solved and we keep forgetting this to our peril. Every day something pops up in a conversation, on one of our teams or on socials that can be addressed by a book from years and sometimes decades ago.
We’ve developed an API-as-Product Assessment Framework that we’re using to assess public APIs. We’re sharing this framework because you will likely find it to be a useful tool for understanding your own API as a product or set of products.
Here’s a scenario you might be familiar with. Say you’re starting a new role as a PM in a startup company (congrats!). You find that the startup has created a robust product with many different features and capabilities. Trying to gain some clarity and focus you ask: “which of those features are most/least used?”. Turns out, nobody knows. So you implement basic analytics mechanisms, wait for a week or two and then come back to the team equipped with a bunch of fancy graphs.
In 2019, I decided to write a book to help new and aspiring product managers land a PM job and launch their careers. My Book, Principles of Product Management, is Now Available!
2,281 days ago Product Hunt launched as a tiny newsletter. The early days were especially chaotic. I didn’t get much sleep, skipped the gym, and buried my head into work. While unsustainable (I'm not advocating overworking yourself!), it was sooo fun and energizing to build something brand new. It was also scary. New products – especially those driven by community – are incredibly fragile.
7 days ago we launched a beta of YourStack (with a grammatically incorrect, non-editable tweet – lol). Instantly those same nostalgic feelings from the early days of Product Hunt re-emerged. The response has been very encouraging. Alex was kind enough to write about it on BuzzFeed. Lucas followed with a story on TechCrunch. And a bunch of folks shared support on Twitter and Product Hunt.
But the product is very early and our roadmap is deep. So far we've onboarded only ~4% of those that have signed up as we build tooling to scale (thanks for all your patience!). I wake up each morning nervous but excited to read your feedback and wild ideas as the team and I continue building.
If you get a chance, create your account and start stacking. We're whitelisting new friendly folks each day.
Feedback? I'd love to hear it at [email protected].
Cheers, Ryan Hoover (@rrhoover)
How do you know if your users understand the interface of your product, or if it's easy for them to achieve desired tasks? Usability testing is the answer.
The problems faced and the lessons learned working on a startup and launching an app.
There is always that new product manager who is wondering what the next 3 months will look like. The successes, learnings, adaptations, expectations, and the list goes on and on.
This article provides definitions on what key metrics are, a framework for categorizing them, and recommendations of four basic rules to set useful metrics, using real-life examples.
Approaching a developer in the wild might seem intimidating. We have a bad habit of mixing words and phrases into our vocabulary that make us sound like Geordi La Forge geeking out on how warp engines function.
HackerNoon is thrilled to share its new writer dashboard. It's now easier to check your drafts, stats, submissions, and comments.
HackerNoon uses machine learning and human editors to translate top stories from English to Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin, Vietnamese, French, Portuguese & Japanese.
How I became the best at what I do
HackerNoon can now generate a headline for your story using the latest AI technology! How cool is that?
Roadmaps make stakeholders, contributors, and users feel safe. They give everyone this false sense that the product team has their shit together because they've thought ahead and have a release schedule.
A comprehensive guide to Product Manager Interview questions asked in top Product companies (Facebook, Google, Whatsapp, Instagram). How to design a product ?
How can a developer make UX an integral part of the development cycle? Read 9 Must-Know UX Design Tips for Developers.
This article is on product leadership and how to lead your product, rather than just being a product manager. Transform requests into user stories and features.
Want to know how to be a good Product Owner? Get to know responsibilities and read tips for better communication with clients and teams. Agile Development 101!
Acquiring US B2B customers: here are some insights and experiences I had at HRtech B2B startup - Alchemist Accelerator, which helped me enter the US market.
Start-ups are super exciting, fun and challenging. You have a notch above of all these when you join as a product leader/manager in start-ups where the product offering is unique yet interesting, the potential is high but the road ahead is less travelled and undiscovered.
Naturally, the responsibility of choosing the right solution by assessing every aspect of the problem and its possible solutions falls on the shoulders of product managers. As a matter of fact, most common challenges faced by product managers are hefted with the weight of trade-offs. You can learn how to deal with these tradeoffs just by keeping a few things in mind and having a structured decision-making process.
If you somehow navigate the mysterious path to reach the Notion HQ at 1:00 PM PST on a Friday, you would find an empty office with two golden poodles and a mutt running around. The entire team would not be far though, just shy of a mile away sitting at Barzotto and eating Extra-Long Noodles pasta over a glass of sparkling white wine. Add some soft serve gelato to that. This is just one of the many idiosyncrasies you would find in this 20 member start-up that has captured over a million users with their sleek product.
In this blog, we’re going to take a quick look at all the stats we provide to writers on HackerNoon to help them supercharge their writing.
Product storytelling is the buzzword most marketers are chasing, as a good product story has the potential to bring more sales and users and never fade away.
It's safe to say all products are after the best User Experience.
Here are 4 reasons why your product should offer a webhooks feature and stop relying on API polling:
OpenAi's Head of Product announces that they're parting ways with the company.
I have attempted to build a Notion template which serves as a job application tracker and different aspects of a job search making the process more conducive.
How to build scalable products by coding for future feature expansion & code deprecation while maintaining a simplified user interface for complex functionality
The HackerNoon team is back at it with a new feature! You can now export your stories to a PDF or a JSON file.
My experience interviewing as a PM for Facebook: How to answer product sense and execution questions and develop product frameworks and stories that sell.
If you have decided to transition into product management but do not know how to begin, you are definitely not alone. This career was ranked as the top 5 job on LinkedIn's Most Promising Jobs for 2019, and in extension has gained many enthusiasts.
5 reasons why you should do competitive analysis before building a product ? Using competitive analysis, startup founders can get a head on in product.
If you're working on something that users actually use, then you're most likely also acquiring data en masse. When it comes to free text feedback, this data might get lost or stay in the hands of some analysts. How to take a few easy steps, to turn that data into actionable steps instead.
Product teams have a lot of great practices that data teams would benefit from adopting. Namely: user-centricity and proactivity.
Now that we're a few days into 2020, it's time to take a few steps back and reflect on some of our accomplishments from 2019. First of all, I'd like to thank the community and our team for not only surviving 2019, but continuing to build momentum into the new decade. Let's celebrate our accomplishments and keep the delivery train rolling! 🚂🎉
We love creating artworks. We've been doing it since the early ages be it the cave paintings in Altamira or Ajanta, we have an innate desire to express and depict the world as we see it. Illustrations, on the other hand, are more than just expressions, they serve as a way to communicate to a much larger audience using a familiar visual language. In a digital age, illustrations are a powerful tool to visually express a piece of text, to empathize with the user, to simplify complex processes and even to bring delight.
5 A.I app ideas you can build & monetize without writing code
I got bored and drew a new Gmail client that magically solves all of the problems that our email clients have with such style and grace. eXmail.
Expectations, surprises, and lots of learning.
In my previous post I described how to apply the Double Diamond - a tool of design thinking (https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/what-framework-innovation-design-councils-evolved-double-diamond) - to product discovery. In this post I will be diving deeper into diamond two (D2) where we address four types of risk as defined by SVPG:
Putting effort into marketing before you have a product may seem counterintuitive. But in reality, it makes total sense. And this is the reasoning behind it.
An entrepreneur at any level can make a software prototyping model to show or test how their idealized product would work in real life.
As a product person, have you ever witnessed large, complex releases result in outages or rollbacks?
Have you wanted to make configuration changes in productio
Advice and lessons learned from 3 months working as a product manager in the technology industry.
There is an abundance of great advice offered to new/aspiring Product Managers. There is also some easy to spot bad advice doing the rounds. The most dangerous type, however, is advice that looks good at the surface but is actually bad. I like to call such advice as, ‘terrible advice’.
Brenden Mulligan, after selling his startup "LaunchKit" to Google, went all-in on his love for building products. He built ten products in 12 months.Just imagine, you have just successfully sold your startup that you worked on for years to a company like Google. What would you do next?
Large enterprises have lots of smart people with great ideas. Some of these people are charming, passionate and convincing. Some of these people are very good at lobbying for their idea with your boss’s boss. And some of these people have the patience and persistence of a Zen priest. And then of course we have our users and our customers. And governments and regulatory bodies (cough GDPR).
Felix is a Product Manager at Microsoft in the Azure cloud services organization. He’s got a very cool background: he’s started his own company and has gone to business school amongst a lot of other things. I had the chance to ask him some questions about his job.
No matter how positive a person you are, you are not a robot. It is easy to get the wind Knocked out of you when the obstacles of modern life get in your way. So if you’re in need of a confidence boost, some inspiring advice. Here are my top 20 inspirational quotes of all time, for entrepreneurs especially.
Ever wondered what is an MVP and why do you need it? Here's a detailed overview of what you need to know about MVP in 2023.
I love to build stuff online, but do I have too many side projects?
There are many commercial Product Information Management (PIM) solutions available on the market. And there are 3 free open source solutions: Akeneo, Pimcore and OpenPIM that you can use to implement a PIM system in your company. I am going to compare these 3 solutions with each other.
Disclaimer: All opinions are my own
The “big splash” rollout is often a big mistake. Methodical phased launches lead to higher success rates and lower churn rates
While product management enjoys unquestioned support in the world’s most successful tech companies, other organisations that could substantially benefit from product management are still yet to adopt and embrace the discipline. So, I want to go through why you need product management in your tech or digital organisation.
Today, we consume more information per person than at any other time in human history. We are continually reading, observing, monitoring, conversing and mentally trying to build a knowledge of the world we can use in our daily work and lives. The problem? The disparity between the total quantity of human knowledge and our ability to assimilate and filter it grows, unremittingly, by the day.
Structuring your thoughts as a Product Manager is imperative to help you make the right decisions. We've collated some tips to help you do just that!
Product and development teams often try to deal with the uncertainty they face with more research, more analysis, more process, more people and more frameworks. Organisations, especially the larger ones, intensify this rather than help navigate the uncertainty.
It's been over 6 months since I joined KritiLabs. The learning that I have had been very steep and intense, considering its a career shift for me from a services based pre-sales to a product based pre-sales and product management.
If you’re working on something new, there are so many directions your work and product can take.
As a product builder
Scaled Agile Frameworks can take some figuring out. Let's understand SAFe. We'll see why to use it, its core elements and how it works.
Don't wait for an invitation to do product strategy, because you won't get it.
An integral part of every e-commerce business is its recommender system (RS).
First time founders build out of passion. They face a problem and try to solve for themselves, making assumptions that everyone has the same problem.
How to select the right business idea? A vital guide for the product designers and startup founders
The transition from sales-led to product-led growth model: What are the benefits and challenges of the product-led growth model.
If a disaster were to occur, would your business be prepared?
How can teams perform at their full potential?
Why it is sometimes confusing to read about product management and why I wrote this guide: I actually wrote this guide in reaction to reading some other product management guides. I noticed that a lot of the guides I read were from pms at larger companies and didn’t actually have what I thought were the core pathways, skills, and experiences regarding product management. The guides did have a lot of tangential anecdotes, a lot of the typical hr-approved talking points of larger companies, and a lot of “check out this cool thing we did.” I tried to write this guide like something you’d hear after getting that Google pm drunk at a bar after the conference instead of hearing his talking points during the conference.
Your Guide to the Main Stages of Tech Startup Development
Whether you're managing stakeholders or just want to get a project out the door, good communication is essential to creating great products.
Every Computer Science major has had this debate with their mates. Usually, such conversations constitute both Native and Hybrid app developers bringing very strong points on the table, until all of them just give up on convincing the other, and just go ahead with the app development themselves.
Start your product-led journey and fuel growth strategy by connecting product management and marketing teams.
As a developer, I often asked myself: what should I learn next? How can I grow further? I always feel that if I'm not growing, I will not keep up with our domain, which is continuously changing and evolving.
There are many possible approaches to launch a new product, and just as many obstacles along the way. However, there's a way of assessing the chances of success before diving in full commitment, and that's where the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) comes in.
Ever heard about Johari Window? Psychologists Joseph and Harrington, in 1955, came up with this term when trying to help people become self-aware. While I would not want to get into too many details about it, here is just a simple explanation in case you haven’t heard about it.
Usually, people get it mixed up thinking of digital marketing and experiential marketing as two separate entities. Truth be told, for a brand to create a diverse multiple channel strategy to connect their brand to customers — they need to leverage on both digital (online) and physical (offline) marketing.
If designers should know how their product may be engineered, they should also know how it may be productized.
I was in the middle of doing a pilates class over Zoom when I noticed a big spider on the ceiling. I pointed it out to my kids who were in the room with me, but knowing that none of us could reach it, I dismissed it and went back to struggling through “the hundreds”. Around me, the kids also resumed their activity... or so I thought.
Discovery is undertaken in two steps with continuous iteration within each step. Step one is ensuring we are solving the right problem and step two is ensuring we are solving the problem right. This post is about step one in this process, AKA diamond one (D1) - my previous post explains step two, AKA diamond two (D2). I started this series with an overview of how to apply the double diamond to product discovery. Again thanks to the British design council for their very awesome double diamond.
How we built a MMORPG in just about 2 years (actually, it’s more).
Learn how open source set the stage for modern product-led growth strategies in SaaS, and how to apply lessons from open source communities to PLG.
Top 5 Podcasts for Startup Founders in December packed with first-hand industry experience.
Excellent problem-solving skill is very essential for a Product Manager, because in the real day to day as a Product Manager will face a lot of complex problems that require deeply thinking for finding the root cause of problems, not only user’s problems but also internal problems such as slow development process, increase growth rate, increase retention rate, etc.
A story about how important it is to keep a smooth balance between complexity and simplicity while building software.
There are already a number of "Uber for Tutors" apps available online. If you're thinking about building your own, here are the key attributes to consider.
Design the best product page for your eCommerce store to attract more customers to your website and make sales.
This is the fourth and final post in my series on an approach to product discovery - Double Diamond Discovery (again thanks to the British Design Concils super awesome framework). So far I have posted an overall view and then expanded on Diamond 1 (D1) and Diamond 2 (D2). This final post discusses the delivery track (https://www.jpattonassociates.com/dual-track-development/) and how this feeds back into the discovery track. In the diagram above there are two steps after discovery - “Delivery” and “Learn”. Although we want to have a ‘ship to learn’ (https://www.intercom.com/blog/intercom-product-principles/) mindset I need to emphasize most of the learning is done in D2 where learning is cheap and fast. There are always many new things to build/fix/improve so it’s easy to ship and forget. But shipping is only half the job.
We often get the itch of wanting to turn it into a functional app right away. But diving into development without the so-called discovery phase might be fatal.
When we’ve said it all, there may be a lot left unsaid
Engineers often complain about product strategy, but this post goes through why it is so hard and how to avoid common pitfalls.
Information technology has had a high growth rate for years and there is a reason for that: a constant flow of innovations in technology, but also in business processes, as growing competition on the market has made innovation a must for every organisation. On the other side, the top skills missing among job applicants in the current world are problem solving, critical thinking, innovation and creativity.
Visual story mapping is more than creating your run-of-the-mill to-do list. It is the best technique to enable your entire product management team to visualize multiple dimensions of information – and focus on how everything will come together to form a successful solution. Visual story maps align all product managers and create a common understanding of what needs to get done and how to go about doing it.
Oh…I am so sleepy…because I launched AskMakers 2.0 on Product Hunt and I have been monitoring it almost without sleeping😪
3 ways we increased conversion from free to paid by 760%
Logan Koshenka from the US has been nominated for a 2020 #Noonie in the Future Heroes category for his beautifully built side project, a Health and Wellness app called Accufit. PSA: Nominations for this award are still open..! Get the Health and Wellness App you can't live without nominated for a Noonie today ➡️ make a Founder's day.
7 Tricks You Need To Know](https://hackernoon.com/social-media-marketing-funnel-7-tricks-you-need-to-know) If you run an ecommerce store, how can you use Instagram to your advantage? These seven tricks can help boost your Instagram sales funnel.
The 2020 #Noonies are here, and they are both much greener and much bigger than last year.
Sunil Tej Gorantla is a product expert, growth hacker, and writer. He believes in solving for what people need and making data-driven decisions.
111. "The Quality of Your Life Depends on the Quality of the Questions You Ask Yourself"— Sara Tortoli
The 2020 #Noonies are here,and they are both much greener and much bigger than last year. Among the 2,000+ deserving humans nominated across 5 categories for over 200 award titles, we discovered Sara Tortoli from Germany, who’s has been nominated for a 2020 #Noonie in the Technology category. Without further ado, we present to you, our big techy world, from the perspective of Sara Tortoli.
Hello, It’s time to learn something new again. This time, I would like to start a new series as zero friction future and talk about the details and categories in which we see high consumer friction and the areas of improvement.
Hear Suchi Deshpande's story, co-founder of Learnfully and Twilio Developer Searchlight Honoree
This Slogging thread by andemosa, richard-kubina, David and Kien occurred in HackerNoon's official #meeting-recap channel, and has been edited for readability.
Essentially, MVP is a tool that allows companies to test the ideas before proceeding to stages of full development and launch.
Have you ever high-fived the universe? If not, let me introduce you to surfing.
We’ve all had arguments about whether customers are going to want this feature or that. Maybe it’s about how the feature might work or even what colour a button might be. It’s an important debate to have, but all too often an important follow-up question is left out: how many customers will this really serve?
Growth Marketing is a broad concept in the consumer product space in general.
This is Part 3 of a comprehensive guide to product bugs. This part of the guide focuses on product bug reports. It provides templates and examples that you can take and apply straight away. Then, through the reports, you’ll see various ways of presenting information so that you and your stakeholders can make good decisions about bugs.
Are you intimidated by usability testing? Don’t know where to start? Feel like it’s too time consuming or expensive? Usability testing doesn’t need to be a fully-fledged psych experiment with a formal lab, big team, and lots of time and money. In the real world, it can (and often should) be much lighter and faster than that.
Natasha from hackernoon.com asks Product Strategist Dani Laity to unpack the sustainable tech product strategies and monetization models powering Aurora Sustainability—2020 Noonie Nominee in for Best Use of Tech for Good in hackernoon.com’s annual internet awards! 🚀
Current situation in the sphere of world's car development has pushed us toward the idea of revolutionary type of transport. There are many companies in the world, which tried to create something similar. However, they did not wanted to lead theirs products on the global market. Our goal is to make an air transporting affordable for everyone.
123. Product Expert Harish Srigiriraju Highlights Importance of Personalization in Digital Applications
Harish Srigiriraju is a product expert at one of the world’s leading telecom companies. He developed a model to personalize the home screen.
There are a hundred roads to becoming a Product Manager. This one involved working as an extra on The New Girl.
Brian Mayer launched a website which listed reservations for sale to popular restaurants in San Francisco.
You need to go from your house to the Airport. Do you take a Limo or a bike? Of course a Limo? The road is bad and the traffic worse... A Limo is not always the right choice.
Over the years, I've found a collection of highly-efficient UX research methods that I rely on when I have little time or money.
Balach Hussain is a founder and Product Manager from Germany, who’s been nominated in the Future Heroes Noonies Award Category. In this brief but wide-ranging interview, one of Hacker Noon's all-time top Contributors shares current personal perspectives on everything from AI and robotics to mindfulness and social equity.
129. Sophia Xing: The Product Manager Crafting AI-Driven Products That Balance Efficiency and Sensibility
Sophia Xing is the Lead Product Manager at Forethought, an AI SaaS platform for customer service teams.
Online grocery services are steadily gaining in popularity. Recent statistics show that 22 percent of American shoppers buy groceries online at least once a wee
Changing to a new line of business is a risky and uncertain process. This article outlines a procedure that explains how to do it in a relatively safe manner.
In this Swann Security Camera Review, we look at the design, features, and performance of the Swann Outdoor Wi-Fi Spotlight Camera.
The power of consumer insights drives businesses forward.
The outbreak and the onslaught of the COVID-19 has changed the landscape for many businesses. There have been a few staggering revelations that might sound threatening, but for a business optimist, they present lucrative opportunities for new business models.
Thanks to experimentation, everything can be done quickly and cheaply. This approach has become our routine at Parimatch Tech.
The JTBD framework introduced me to the idea that customers don’t “buy” products. Instead they “hire” products or services to help them overcome an obstacle and better their lives. Products that deliver on this promise of upgrading the customers’ lives are loved whereas the ones failing to do so are dumped.
We’re working on a more detailed follow up to the high-level research we did into APIs and the ASX100. As part of the follow-up, I’m looking into the APIs offered by ASX100 companies and, for no scientific reason, chose to start with an analysis of NAB’s developer portal.
Nicholas Oneill from the Netherlands has been nominated in Product Development for his double diamond discovery series on Hacker Noon.
Genuine deadlines are there to help the organization seize an opportunity. Let's explore how they impact engineering organization and how not to antagonize them
It is 1943 and you are Head of the United States Eighth Air Force. Your mission is to destroy Germany's ability to wage war and free up the skies for the Allied Forces. The problem is that your Bombers are being zapped out of the sky like mosquitos drawn into the fire in a summery night.
Let me preface this by saying I’m a big believer in the bias for action principle popularised by Amazon. I’ve used it as a guideline whenever I didn’t have enough data to make an informed decision.
The biggest winners in New Product Development are the companies that continue to create a steady stream of new products in new categories. Product development strategy is the way to create growth through generating streams of new offerings.
You are building a product and you put your hurt and soul into it. You're rewriting the details, crafting perfect pixel design, generating leads, ads campaigns, cold outreach, and publishing on all channels.
This is Part 2 of a comprehensive guide to product bugs. Part 1 explored what product bugs are, why they occur, where they come from, and why they do and don’t matter. Part 2 focuses on how to manage product bugs.
Minimally Viable Products are a myth or, if you prefer a mental model. Always wrong but sometimes useful.
The discussions around product validation and research have provoked some excellent debate in the community and at Terem.
(Image Credits: chiefexecutive.net)
A teary-eyed heartbroken kid, who once dropped his ice -cream cone, said to me — “never get attached to anything in life.” Truer words were never spoken before!
Deciding on what to build inhouse vs. buy off the shelf requires product prioritization. Build a capability assessment to improve your product strategy.
Over 4,000 designers responded to Taylor Palmer's annual UX Tools survey. Here are some takeaways from the results.
Startups might sound cool but they are not easy!
Musescore has just announced the latest version of Musescore 3, which includes work by Martin Keary (aka: Tantacrul), who joined the team as the Head of Design in November. He has been collaborating with the community and internal team on a design plan to make Musescore faster and more intuitive. This release is the first step towards that goal.
155. "The most successful products are those with a simple and consistent framework" - Marco Mottana
Not everyone has the technical-knowhow to navigate the highly volatile crypto terrain. There are a lot of moving pieces. It will surprise you to know that trading, staking, mining, and hodling are not the only sure way to earn crypto income. In 2020, we got introduced to yield farming and the variety of ways to utilize DeFi’s money markets. Notably, there is no means to know for sure which crypto trend would drive crypto in 2021. The key takeaway from this is that we are yet to scratch the surface of the possibilities embedded in crypto and blockchain technology, even 11 years after the famous introduction of Bitcoin.
As a product manager/owner of a product, a service or a feature, when do you get to know something went wrong?
You got a perfect product, been used by about a million of users, so does it mean your product is successful? Well, if you think right now it’s on the path of success, but it might just take a small turn to go down the road to failure. Product just can’t be successful and keep its game up for a longer run unless it exploit the behavioural domain of its users.
Let's weigh up the risks of releasing vs. the risks of not releasing. Many organisations worry about the risk of releasing more than the risks of not releasing. People focus on what will go wrong if you release a product instead of what opportunities you will miss if you don’t release. If you want to ship great products, you need to have a more balanced and constructive conversation.
Since 2018 I've been involved in building close to a dozen products. Most of them I've shut down, some of them I've sold to others – and some are still alive! I credit a lot to this time – I believe these products are a major factor in my personal and professional development.
MuseScore is a popular digital sheet music brand known for two big products. The first is an open source desktop app that allows users to create high quality scores. The second is MuseScore.com, which contains the largest collection of sheet music on the internet. Today there are more than 1,000,000 scores uploaded by users, with 1,000 new scores uploaded daily.
Startups are unpredictable, but there are a few common mistakes that every product startup is doomed to make! What matters more, is how you react to them.
Learn how to design products with happiness in mind by using focus and specificity in order to make the process for both your customers and your team smooth.
If building products is hard, positioning your product is harder. No matter what you build and sell, how you position your product dictates what you do. How you prioritize, marketing campaigns, sales strategy, it all changes based on how your product is positioned.
Many teams and organisations jump into build mode too early. Then they build something that customers reject, they miss the mark, or they need extra budget to get it there. When you suggest a Product Discovery as a way to help get better results it gets rejected. This article is a way to answer the question: “Why do Product Discovery?”
I’ve put together a list of books that contain the ideas that I’ve found most useful for a new product venture at this stage.
Many tech businesses rely on a mix of process and platitudes to define how they work. Instead, they should focus on the tactics that inform their processes.
This week Product School Slack's community members uncovered ways to properly plan product sprints.
Jobs-to-be-Done is the framework for understanding your customer’s needs. However, it goes further than just understanding, and it provides the foundations for improving existing products and services, launching new products and go-to-market activities.
No affiliate links. No financial incentives. Just a simple product manager’s own beautiful biases for the best picks of 2020.
Natasha Nel interviews 6x Noonie Nominee*, hackernoon.com Contributor, and Prolific Maker, Zoe Chew, to talk Product, Tech, Startups, and Marketing.
To become a product manager, I had to first ascertain what transferrable skills I had that would be relevant in product management and was ready to develop new ones that I did not yet have.
I no longer assume I know what someone actually does when they say they are a Product Manager. This year, I had a chance to have over 40 or so 1:1s with folks from outside of work in different stages of their product management journey. No two roles were the same. I distilled our conversations into one picture in an attempt to put a unifying model to the various flavors of product management discipline out there.
Management is just doing The D.A.M.N job: providing Direction; fostering Alignment; maintaining Motivation, and making sure there's No Blockers.
The software industry has a unique privilege: shipping a flawed product is not that big of a deal. The cost of fixing a software product and redistributing it again is so low that your success is not determined by the quality of your product, but by how fast you are able to fix flaws.
User experience workshops are a crucial phase of a well-thought-out product. There is a wide variety of cases where such workshops can help solve pressing problems, critical for a project's success. They can range from tackling intricate design or UX issues to receiving constructive feedback on your designs.
Believe most of us are already aware of what is expected of a Product Manager profile in any internet company, starting from being a mini CEO of the product to be the interface between business, UX & technology. Here in addition to those common attributes of a PM profile I am going to point out few not so common traits but important qualities a Product Manager should possess.
Products are developed, provided, and enhanced by people, and effectively leading them is crucial to achieve product success. But leading stakeholders and development teams requires overcoming six product leadership challenges that range from lacking transactional power to guiding self-organising teams. The description of the challenges below is an extract from my new book How to Lead in Product Management.
Photo credits : Simon Abrams on Unsplash
Apply these simple strategies to promote longevity and build success for your startup
As a product manager, I came across numerous situations where I had to put myself into the shoes of customers as well as stakeholders. This is a necessary step to get to know the requirements from both sides and integrate these requirements into a product. That being said, one could argue that the product is basically an intermediary between the stakeholders and customers. Well, not literally stakeholders but their businesses. That made me think of an approach where each product could be built as a multi-sided platform, which connects two groups of participants — the ones that offer a service (stakeholders or business owners) and the others that are looking for the same services (customers or other businesses).
Celebrating $100,000 revenue selling Google Sheet Tutorials and Google Sheets. Yep, I generated $100k in revenue In 24 months selling Google Sheets.
“In these unprecedented times…” The Humans of Hacker Noon design unprecedented products, and contribute to the internet in unprecedented ways. One such human is Agnieszka Zimolag from the US - interviewed here following a 2020 Noonie Nomination for contributions to the subject of Product Design.
Measuring success is an integral part of any company, without which we cannot operate a product in any way or form. Without measuring success, the whole product vision would simply be based on some deluded platform of presumptions and intuitions which may or may not be correct. However, the question is what constitutes as ‘success’ and what should be measured in calculating how close or far we are to this success?
Steve Lesnard joined the Product Talk Podcast to discuss how The North Face not only survived the pandemic but managed to thrive during it.
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. - Martin Flower
Build your products based on the testimonials you want to get from your customers
Vindhya C won 2019's coveted Noonie Award for Product Manager of the Year. Nominations for the 2020 Award for Product Manager of the Year are OPEN UNTIL 12 AUGUST AT NOON! Nominate someone you admire for a Hacker Noon Tech Award and make a PM's day today!
Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made in either a program’s design or its source code, or in components and operating systems used by such programs.
While companies become increasingly customer-centric, PMs are still sitting in a gold mine of underused customer knowledge. This is how can we change that.
In “Alice in Wonderland” we are invited to escape reality by tumbling into a whimsical world of nonsense. I found in this story a good analogy for PMs.
192. How to Manage Machine Learning Products Part I: Why is managing machine learning products so hard?
In my previous article, I talked about the biggest difference that Machine Learning (ML) brings: ML enables a move away from having to program the machine to true autonomy (self-learned). Machines make predictions and improve insights based on patterns they identify in data without humans explicitly telling them what to do. That’s why ML is particularly useful for challenging problems that are difficult for people to explain to machines. It also means that ML can make your products more personalized, more automated, and more precise. Advanced algorithms, massive data, and cheap hardware are enabling ML to become the main driver of GDP.
A Product Manager and a Software Engineer walk into a bar.
A simple analyses of Pocket app using the infamous Hook Framework
Introducing the newest innovation from HarperDB: HarperDB Custom Functions. With the release of HarperDB 3.1 users are able to define their own API endpoints within HarperDB. What does that mean for you? HarperDB grows from a distributed database to a distributed application development platform with integrated persistence - one that can serve as a single solution for all of your backend needs. We’re collapsing the stack!
Actually, it’s exactly the other way around. A startup, any startup, has too many opportunities and paths it can take. Business opportunities, technology opportunities, in marketing and of course with its product. So obviously, a startup must constantly give up on opportunities and possible paths.
This week Product School Slack's community members discussed issues regarding technical debt when it comes to prioritization. Check it out!
Learn what makes product management possible as a remote worker.
TRIZ is a theory and process that facilitates creative problem-solving. With the challenges imposed by the new system, TRIZ might be the tool needed to help.
I currently work in a SaaS startup as a Product Manager. I’ve about four years of experience in the SaaS domain and have worked in various functions in my career.
Today on Hacker Noon—We Have Questions: Will this pandemic finally usher in the era of post-humanism that techno-utopians have been predicting for decades? What do we need to know about this recession? WTF Is A Transaction Relayer And How Does It Work?
Pricing trends are particularly important for B2B SaaS to keep an eye on as they indicate how the buyers in your market value the types of services you offer.
The Social Dilemma appears to have triggered sensible topics (not new though) about privacy and how technology, that was not intended to endanger people ends up being used and perceived as a public enemy.
I’ve just finished my first 30 days as a Product Manager moving from my previous Frontend Developer role in the Oberlo Growth team. I decided it’s also a good time to pause and reflect on all that has happened in my first month.
In this post, I'll try to share my experience on learning product manager’s job as a software engineer. What the job is like, what’s involved, as an introvert can you be a become a product manager, and many other questions you might have. I am a technical co-founder of a product management app called Shipit and needed to put myself into the role of product manager to learn the intricacies of the job.
If there is one constant theme in my work across companies and organisations of all shapes and sizes, it is (mis)understanding your customer. So, I’ve put together a checklist for understanding your customer to help you quickly get everyone aligned on how well you really understand your customer.
This article describes the ‘idea model’ and provides various examples of real ideas — explains how to write effective executive summaries for your concepts.
“We are still waiting on a cure for death, but until then building products may be the next best thing.”
Scrum is an increasingly popular way to manage projects, and for a good reason. It can help your small teams deliver higher quality products faster and more efficiently than before.
At HackerNoon, our developers are busy.
Problem-solving question is the most frequent and recurring question asked PM interview. Here's a way on how shall one approach it.
When we're prioritizing, we're trying to answer the question "What, among all the stories we could work on right now, is the best possible use of our time?" The obvious answer is to say "The story that adds most value to our users". This answer only leads to more questions such as:
A lot of remote teams start using Slack as a watering hole for getting everyone together to discuss what's going on and what'll happen next. Having all of these discussions happening in the #general channel is way too noisy. So teams start creating a bunch of random channels devoted to a specific purpose. Here are some of the channels we have at Hacker Noon.
Lose the to-do list, there is only one thing you need to focus on
What are the key leadership qualities that inspire teams to build amazing products?
Quite often, beginning designers contact me on Instagram asking:
Creating the Stances of the Product Owner
Product management is a crucial skill in demand at many large tech companies. As such this list reflects some of the more lucrative packages available.
Is 10x product success merely arbitrary luck or based on merit? It’s a question that can torture even the most rational-minded product managers. But which should you focus on when victory is on the line?
Your project may contain tasks that depend on each other. Sometimes a task cannot start until its dependent (predecessor) task finishes, or maybe the task can start when its dependent task starts as well. As you manage tasks with these more complex dependency types (FS, SF, SS, FF), you may find more specialized software or SaaS tool to help you plan and visualize these tasks.
Over the past 7 years in Product, I’ve worked with a lot of Product Managers. Some were great at being unreasonable, many were extreme generalists, and most were great at saying no.
Hacker News is said to be the Holy Grail for tech folks. There’s one thing that a company, startups in particular, wants desperately: RIGHT traffic for free.
Analyzing how successful indie businesses are able to differentiate themselves.
Unlock 3 market opportunities to help game creators and game players make money, and monetize game tech by solving real problems
While consumer products get all the hype, B2B products are a quiet gem
Getting new products and new ventures off the ground in massive companies requires overcoming enormous hurdles. There is a substantial amount of knowledge available on overcoming the technical hurdles – desirability, viability and feasibility – but there is limited information to be found on overcoming the corporate forces at play in massive companies. These corporate forces are arguably the biggest hurdles a new product venture faces.
We like to apply labels to users: they’re irrational, lazy, unpredictable, rushed, and so on.
Entrepreneurship is getting popular with every passing day, leading to an increase in rising startups. But how many have tasted success?
After the Microsoft acquisition, GitHub has been on a roller coaster ride. It has been winning the developer community’s affinity by launching a series of offerings, one after another, starting from the free private repositories to the GitHub Sponsors program.
A million pompous Tweets, a thousand pontifical TedX videos and hundreds of unnecessary hot takes don’t lie: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here, and it’s here to stay. Ok. Good. What now? Well, before AI can truly be called a democratised technology, we have to go beyond Silicon Valley startups and implement it within small/medium businesses and governments to reap the rewards promised by the technology.
Below is a glimpse of how creative people try and schedule a meeting.