William Gill

There is a big difference between speed and velocity. Good speed increases velocity. Bad speed decreases velocity. Remember first year physics? Speed is a measure of distance over time. Velocity is a measure of displacement over time. Velocity is a vector: it has direction. We all know the sensation of running really fast (having high…

I interviewed a candidate for a Product Manager position the other day. I like to ask a really simple question at the start of a PM interview: “What is your main responsibility as a Product Manager?” The answer I got from this candidate was one that I’ve heard many times before: “My primary responsibility as…

I recently wrote a guest post for the guys at the Mobile Growth Stack. Check it out here. It covers the basic rules of setting up a Growth Model and what to avoid, and you can download a sample .xls that includes everything in the article. Head over to the Mobile Growth Stack to check…

Last week, Elon Musk posted his second ‘Master Plan’ for Tesla. In it, he lays out the strategy for Tesla for the next decade or so, in a clear, concise and highly readable way. He doesn’t use slides. He doesn’t use visuals or charts or graphs. Just words. As a Product Manager, when was the…

In the early days of launching a new product, it’s useful to think about your market in terms of “pockets of demand”. A pocket of demand is of course another way of saying “target market”. It is essentially identifying a group, or niche, of potential customers who share a common problem that you can solve…

<tl;dr> The iPad Pro is a capable machine for getting all kinds of “real work” done while on the go. After much deliberation, I bought myself a new iPad Pro 9.7″ about four weeks ago, and since then I’ve been running an experiment to see if I could use my iPad for “real work”. Inspired…

I’ve met lots of product teams who will tell you: “User Experience is a design thing.” They hire ‘User Experience Designers’ to design the User Experience, and generally assume that they alone are responsible for the overall UX. I believe that simply assuming the User Experience is a ‘Design Thing’ is a very dangerous mindset…

This week their annual developer event Google casually announced a huge new feature coming soon to Android: Instant Apps. Chris Maddern called it their “one more thing” moment. When finally released, perhaps later this year, it could be the one of the most fundamental changes to the way mobile apps work since the App Store…

<tl/dr> Growth Product Managers and Growth ‘Hackers’ should learn to code Python: it saves time by automating reporting and analysis, and it will make you a little less dependent on your data science team and a little more confident to go looking through your analytics data yourself. I run Growth and Monetisation for HERE’s consumer…

Being a great Product Manager in tech is more than shuffling roadmaps and writing user stories. Great PMs are first and foremost masters of their market: the segments, the customers, and their needs, and they spend a great deal of time talking to customers themselves and conducting field research. Great PMs are the walking embodiment…

Growth is about finding new channels. Messaging in general as a channel is young and fresh – and there will be a goldrush very, very soon. Services like Slack and Facebook Messenger are following the lead set by the asian chat successes like Line and WeChat in turning chat into a platform that allows access…

I did a presentation at the ProductTank Berlin February event last night. My slides are available here. I’m happy to chat more about OKRs, and how we work. Contact me!

In the recent fantastic piece on The Verge covering interviews with the top brass behind the Amazon Kindle, the ultimate product vision behind the Kindle series of eReaders is articulated beautifully. From the article: For Amazon, paper is more than a material for making prototypes. It’s the inspiration for the Kindle of the future: a…

The Product Manager isn’t just a middle-man. If you’re a PM, and your answer to every question is: “I don’t know, I need to go and ask ___”, then I’m afraid you’re doing something wrong. You might not be able to give engineering estimates, but you should know your team and your technology well enough…

In case you missed it (although the tech press have had little else to report on today, it seems), some guy launched a kickstarter project with the ambitious goal of raising $10 to make a potato salad. (Link) The project description: “I’m making potato salad. Basically I’m just making potato salad. I haven’t decided what…

I came across two interesting pieces of Microsoft news today. Firstly, Microsoft have bought the company behind a Visual Studio plugin called UnityVS which enables developers using the cross platform game engine, Unity, to write and debug their Unity programs directly within Visual Studio. Unity has support for all the major mobile operating systems, and…

The newly launched Amazon Dash device (link) is a single-purpose hardware device that allows users to scan the items in their fridge or pantry that they’re running low on, and an order is automatically sent to Amazon’s fresh grocery service. I find it very interesting because it is representative of how you can now build…

There are lots of lessons behind the curtains of the $19 BN Whatsapp acquisition by Facebook. There’s lessons about the scale and value of social, about the continually evolving mobile platform. There’s of course the rags-to-riches story of the founders going from food stamps to being billionaires in just a few short years, and a…

There are many frameworks available to help product teams develop and express a customer value proposition. One of my favourites is this Value Proposition Canvas, which was based on the canvas from the creators of the Business Model Canvas. Expressing the proposition on this canvas is a great way of forcing you to think through…

Last week Facebook announced the new Paper app – an app that turns your Facebook news feed into your own personal newspaper. At the same time they announced Facebook Creative Labs and promised further small, single-purpose apps. This is all part of a growing trend from Facebook to un-bundle their core mobile product/service into smaller…