Your product’s value to the customer is your benefit-to-cost ratio, also known as return on investment (ROI). Whenever you can provide more benefit through your product, or provide your product at lower cost, you make your product more attractive to prospective new customers and to existing customers.

Most product managers are aware of how to increase the benefit their product provides, but few consider the cost component of their value proposition. One of the most significant costs associated with products is the switching cost, also known as adoption cost.

In this article, we’ll dive deep into the definition of switching cost, and the different flavors of switching costs. Then in our next article, we’ll create a framework around switching costs to enable you to drive a stronger value proposition through your product. Continue Reading

Product managers aren’t just responsible for shipping a product. We’re also responsible for building the engine that builds great products. In other words, we build processes, best practices, and cultures around what makes a good product.

To strengthen this engine over time, one of our most valuable tools is the retrospective. It enables us to identify what’s good, what’s bad, and iterate towards better and better products and processes.

In this article, I’ll define what a retrospective is, how to conduct one, and how to apply it to various aspects of product management.

Let’s dive in!

Definition of Retrospective

The word “retrospective” is made up of two roots – retro and spect.

Retro means “backwards”, and spect means “looking”. Therefore, a retrospective quite literally means to look back on some period of time or some set of actions. Continue Reading

As you continue to grow in your product manager role with new responsibilities, you’ll find that you’re entirely in charge of your career trajectory and professional development.

For many, this is daunting. Traditional roles usually have clear guidelines on how to advance upwards, but in product management the path is less clear – since there are so many different kinds of product managers, there’s no single path to success.

So, let’s walk through a framework to help you take control of your career as a PM.

As I’ve mentioned before, product managers are also products, and therefore we can build product roadmaps for ourselves. Any good roadmap contains 3 components:

1. Initial state
2. End state
3. Path to get from initial state to end state

So, let’s tackle each of these three components to build up our professional development roadmap! Continue Reading

Product managers care deeply about the engagement of their users. After all, engagement is an indicator that their product is providing value to users.

Of course, engagement can be measured in many different ways. One of the most important qualities of a successful product is that users find what they’re looking for. To measure this quality, let’s introduce a new metric to our tool kit: the bounce rate.

Definition of Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is defined as “total number of visits where only one page was viewed”, divided by “total entries to the page”.

Let’s make this more concrete with examples. Say that we’re looking at the following 5 visits:

• Visit #1: 2 pages viewed, user ID 123
• Visit #2: 3 pages viewed, user ID 456
• Visit #3: 1 page viewed, user ID 123
• Visit #4: 6 pages viewed, user ID 789
• Visit #5: 1 page viewed, user ID 468

To calculate the bounce rate, we can ignore the different users, and focus just on the number of pages viewed on each visit. Remember, not all data is relevant – in this case, user ID doesn’t contribute to the definition of bounce rate. Continue Reading

As a product manager, your objective is to create products that solve user pain. To solve the pain of your users, you need to understand them first – and user interviews are a fantastic way to get to know your user better.

One of the challenges with user interviews is knowing how to get started. After all, very few product managers are formally trained on how to interview users.

Therefore, in this guide, I’ll lay out clear steps to prepare for a user interview, to conduct a user interview, and to capture learnings from the user interview. This guide is structured the following way:

• Before the Interview
  • Plan
  • Source
  • Screen
  • Schedule
  During the Interview
  • Contextualize
  • Dive
  • Replicate
  After the Interview
  • Retrospect
  • Document

  Furthermore, I’ll provide an example as we run through the guide. I’ll pretend to conduct user research for Instacart. Continue Reading

Nearly every product manager I’ve ever spoken with has the exact same situation – calendars filled entirely with meetings.

There’s a reason why we have so many meetings as product managers. Meetings can be one of the most effective ways to debate topics, make decisions, and create action plans across diverse stakeholders.

Since meetings take up so much of our time, let’s discuss best practices for how to run effective meetings, to ensure that we get the most value for our time.

Principle #1: Define a meeting owner

Every meeting needs a single owner. After all, multiple psychological studies have shown that in situations of unclear or shared ownership, responsibility becomes diluted, which leads to less effectiveness across the organization. Continue Reading