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How great Product Managers look forward
There is a lot of day-to-day grind as a PM. Tickets to write, bugs to triage, meetings to facilitate. Maybe the QA team needs help. Maybe the marketing manager is sick and you need to help run an acquisition campaign. There is always something urgent that needs your attention, your time and your focus. Indeed,…
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Why Speed is not the same as Velocity
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…
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What would you say… you do here?
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…
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How to build a basic Growth Model
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…
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Product Managers – Learn from Elon Musk: write down your product strategy in prose
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…
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Early Growth: Look for “Pockets of Demand”
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…
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Notes on using the iPad Pro for “real work”
<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…
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User Experience is everybody’s job
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,…
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Ways to think about Android Instant Apps, and what it means for developers
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.…
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Growth Product Managers: You should learn to code Python. Here’s why:
<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…