Posts tagged "Product Discovery"

12 posts

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The Feature Factory Problem AI Amplifies

4 min read

AI accelerates shipping but not learning. Teams build faster without validating if they're solving the right customer problems.

Your team just shipped three features this week. Last quarter, that would have taken a month. AI tools turned your engineers into feature factories. Your designers generate variants in minutes. Your PMs prototype without waiting for engineering resources. Everyone's celebrating velocity. Who's checking if you're solving the right problems? Creation velocity isn't validation velocity Recent research shows contradictory results on AI's impact. Some studies report significant productivity gains, others find developers actually slow down when...
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Why Retention Starts at Onboarding, Not Growth

3 min read

Retention problems are created in week one, not month six. Product decisions about time-to-value determine long-term stickiness.

Most products lose 80% of users within 30 days. Teams see this happening and hand the problem to growth. They add email campaigns, push notifications, re-engagement hooks. None of it moves the number because the retention problem wasn't created in month six. It was locked in during week one. This isn't about better onboarding flows or slicker tutorials. It's about product decisions made before launch that determine whether users stay or leave months later. By...
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Early Experience: A Different Approach to Agent Training

4 min read

Meta's Early Experience research explores agents learning from their own rollouts. Early results look promising—here's what changes if it scales.

AI agents are currently in use, handling customer service interactions, automating research workflows, and navigating complex software environments. But training them remains resource-intensive: you either need comprehensive expert demonstrations or the ability to define clear rewards at every decision point. Meta's recent research explores a third path. Agent Learning via Early Experience proposes agents that learn from their own rollouts—without exhaustive expert coverage or explicit reward functions. It's early, but the direction is worth understanding....
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The Limit of Metrics

4 min read

Metrics measure the present, but intuition imagines the future. Here’s why great product managers need both — and how to define intuition.

Product managers love metrics. Dashboards, OKRs, funnel charts — these tools are everywhere. They give us a sense of control, objectivity, and accountability. But metrics have limits. They can only measure what already exists. They tell you how a current feature is performing, but they can’t tell you what to build next. This is where intuition comes in. What Intuition Really Means in Product Work In product management, “intuition” often gets dismissed as gut feel....
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Why Customer Success Belongs at the Start of Product Strategy

7 min read

Shift-left Customer Success by embedding it early in product strategy, design, and GTM to boost retention and drive SaaS growth.

Customer Success (CS) is one of the most misunderstood roles in SaaS. As Saahil Karkera wrote in a widely shared LinkedIn post, one quarter CS teams are heroes; the next, they're blamed for churn, adoption drops, and burnout. This volatility exists because CS sits at the fault lines of Product, Sales, and Customer expectations. The solution isn’t hiring “miracle CSMs.” It’s treating Customer Success as a shift-left strategy—designed into product, GTM, and organizational incentives, not...
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Architect vs. Gardner: Product Development Mindsets

5 min read

Product leaders must know when to act as Architects and when to act as Gardeners. Learn how to balance precision and adaptability in product development.

Product development demands vision and execution. But the mindset you bring to the work often shapes outcomes as much as strategy or process. Two powerful metaphors illustrate this tension: the Architect and the Gardener. Both have value. Both can lead to success. But knowing when to adopt one mindset over the other—and how to balance them—can mean the difference between building structures that endure and nurturing products that adapt. The Architect Mindset Architects design with...
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Modernizing the Product Requirements Process

4 min read

PRDs aren’t dead—they’re evolving. Learn how to modernize product requirements with outcome focus, living documents, and AI-powered prototyping.

Few artifacts in product management are as debated as the Product Requirements Document (PRD). Once a cornerstone of software development, the PRD has been dismissed by many as a relic of the waterfall era. Agile evangelists often claimed that documentation slowed teams down, stifled creativity, and created rigid contracts rather than flexible collaboration. Yet the pendulum has swung too far. In many organizations, the absence of structured requirements has led to chaos: misaligned expectations, duplicated...
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Cultivating Strong Product Culture

5 min read

Learn how to cultivate a strong product culture by empowering teams, aligning leadership, and focusing on outcomes over features.

Culture may feel intangible, but in product organizations it’s one of the strongest predictors of success. Teams with the right culture move faster, make better decisions, and consistently build products that matter. Teams without it often drown in process, produce outputs that don’t add up, and lose trust with customers and stakeholders. A strong product culture doesn’t appear by accident. It is cultivated deliberately through leadership choices, organizational design, and team habits. Technology as an...
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Love the Problem, Solution will Follow

6 min read

Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Learn seven techniques to uncover customer needs and build products that create lasting impact.

When you’re building a product, it’s easy to get excited about the “how.” The sleek design, the advanced tech stack, the long feature list. But here’s the hard truth that separates great products from forgettable ones: don’t fall in love with the solution; fall in love with the problem. This mindset shift can be the difference between a product that thrives and one that just exists. Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour...
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Defeat Bias: Build Products that Truly Matter

6 min read

Learn how to defeat confirmation bias in product management with eight practical techniques to improve decisions and build products that truly matter.

When you’re deep in product work—dreaming up features, refining flows, or debating the next roadmap bet—there’s a sneaky force that can derail even the most well-intentioned efforts: confirmation bias. It’s a natural human tendency. You form a belief, and suddenly your brain filters reality through a lens that only shows evidence supporting that belief. Contradictory data fades into the background. In product development, this can be deadly. You may convince yourself you know “the next...
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Jobs-to-be-Done - Demand Reducers and Systems Thinking

5 min read

Explore the demand reducers in Jobs-to-be-Done—Inertia and Anxiety—and how systems thinking helps overcome hidden barriers to product adoption.

In Part 1, we explored the forces that generate demand: the push of dissatisfaction with the status quo and the pull of a better future. Together, they explain why customers look for change and what attracts them to a solution. But even when push and pull are strong, adoption isn’t guaranteed. Hidden forces often prevent products from being hired. These are the demand reducers: Inertia and Anxiety. As Alan Klement describes, these forces are as...
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Jobs-to-be-Done and the Forces that Create Product Demand

5 min read

Learn how Jobs-to-be-Done explains the forces that create product demand—Push and Pull—and why progress, not features, drives adoption.

We hear a lot about being “customer-centric.” It’s on slides, in strategy decks, and peppered into pitches. But too often it’s a buzzword. The real test is this: do we truly understand why customers choose our products—or why they don’t? The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework, shaped by thinkers like Alan Klement, offers a clearer lens. Customers don’t buy products because of features alone. They “hire” them to make progress in their lives. That progress is the...
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