Product Management Articles of August

Here are articles around product management that I’ve found interesting this past month.

20 Years of Product Management in 25 Minutes | Mind the Product

“In this entertaining and insightful talk from #mtpcon, Dave Wascha distills his twenty year career in product management into 12 key lessons.”

How to Improve Your Experiment Design | Mind the Product

“Product teams that adopt an experimental mindset start with hypotheses rather than assuming their beliefs are facts. Experiment design, on the other hand, is the plan that a product team puts in place to test a specific hypothesis.”

Why You Need to Follow Steve Jobs and 'Work Backwards' | Mind the Product

“They say that every great business addresses a real customer need. If you've ever found expressing your customer need slippery, this is for you.”

The Only Metric that Matters | Mind the Product

“Metrics can quickly become overwhelming, and in this insightful #mtpcon talk Josh Elman breaks through the data noise and defines the one metric that matters.”

Personas vs. Jobs-to-Be-Done | Mind the Product

“With the popularity of the JTBD paradigm, there are calls in some corners to abandon personas, suggesting that JTBD has emerged as a more useful technique.

Scaling Up Without Slowing Down | Mind the Product

“The Financial Times has grown quickly into a profitable, digitally-centric publisher, and their Heads of Product and Tech share how they did it without slowing down. Performance = Profitability”

Making Good Decisions as a Product Manager | Black Box of PM

“These decisions can be about anything: small ones like a line of copy in the docs, to big ones like what the MVP of a new feature should be. The decisions PMs make are the ones that unblock their team so they can continue to build. They don’t need to make every decision, but they are responsible for ensuring a decision gets made — whether by them, their team, or their stakeholders.”

The Process vs. The Product | Product Management Insider

“We work in an industry that glorifies the process of everything we build. We are obsessed with roadmaps, methodologies, acronyms, and productivity tools. This shared language gives us a sense of belonging and makes us feel like we are in fact product people.”

How we build products at Asana — The Product Process: From Inception to Launch | Medium

“On the PM team at Asana, we’re always thinking about how we can create a great working environment that makes the best of everyone’s super powers. We want to be fast moving and open to risks while also maintaining a high quality bar and consistency across the customer experience.”

Product launches are hard but what comes next is even more important | Inside Intercom

“If you work in marketing you know the drill. As your launch day comes to a close, it’s natural to pat each other on the back and wipe your hands clean as you head home. The hard part’s over. You launched. The reality is you aren’t done. The launch is the start of the marketing journey, not the end goal. You now begin a cycle of listening, learning, iterating and shipping improvements based on real customer feedback instead of assumptions.”

Product Marketing and Product Management: What’s The Difference? [Infographic] | Drift

“Contrary to popular belief, they aren’t responsible for the same things — but you aren’t alone if you work at a software company and have ever wondered about the difference between the two roles. Here’s the quick version: If a product manager is responsible for helping to create and define a new product, a product marketer’s job is to bring it to market and put it on the shelf.”

Building empathy in a product team | Inside Intercom

"For product teams, empathy building activities such as observing research or doing customer support is often not considered “real work”. However, product teams that consistently keep customer needs in mind are able to maintain and evolve their products in ways that won’t negatively impact the user experience."

Designing for People First, Product Second | Habit Summit

“Quick Tip 1: Design for people first, not product first. Ask questions and find out what your users want/need. Quick Tip 2: The four steps to designing for people first: 1) identify the feeling, 2) consider context, 3) understand motivations, 4) get to know their values. Quick Tip 3: Ask “What are my users trying to tell me?” Then look at 1) their stated behavior vs. 2) their actual behavior.”