Product Management Weekly - Issue #11
Weekly aggregation of articles about Strategy, Product Leadership, Growth/Retention/Engagement and Design with a quick summary in your inbox
👋🏽 Hi! thepmblog.com is active again and moving to Substack
We know we have been silent over the past couple of weeks, so firstly apologies for that. Over the last couple of months we have spend some time doing some research, so stay tuned for some good write-ups in the coming weeks. This current newsletter is part of our Product Weekly newsletter series, where we provide an aggregation of some good PM articles. Since we are moving to Substack, to make reading more fun we are going to divide our articles into 5 (+1) segments: General, Strategy, Product Leadership, Growth/Retention/Engagement and Design, along with an additional Fun Learning section. Feedback is highly welcome, so please do let me know on how we can make this newsletter better. Thank you 🙏🏽
📜 General
The Ultimate Guide To New Feature Announcement In SaaS
Article: https://userpilot.com/blog/new-feature-announcement-guide/
tl;dr; This article by user-pilot goes into detail about how to handle new feature announcement in SaaS space. Feature announcement is important as it helps informs customers of the features being released thereby potentially helping with adoption thereby reducing churn as well as assist in customer acquisition. The article highlights various company examples on how feature announcement are handled. Some key takeaways:
Product teams should have a specific goal with each announcement, as every announcement has a creates a user touch-point. PMs should look into user segmentation while making release announcement to not only reduce the noise, but also allow customizing messaging thereby leading to higher engagement with each announcement.
Key features of a good announcement include a user benefit, a clear CTA, and a combination of GIFs and videos to enable the user to easily grasp the information.
There are multiple channels to send out release notification messages depending on the product - in-app notifications are the most common, others like social media, emails, press releases, etc can also be great methods depending on the goal we want to achieve.
Why investors don’t fund dating
Article: https://andrewchen.com/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/
tl;dr; Andrew talks about why VCs don’t fund dating, with key reasons being:
Built-in churn
Dating has a shelf-life
Paid acquisition channels are expensive
City-by-city expansion sucks
Demographic mismatch with investors
📜 Product Leadership:
Crossing the Canyon: Product Manager to Product Leader
Article: https://www.reforge.com/blog/crossing-the-canyon-product-manager-to-product-leader
tl;dr; A very good article for all PMs, which goes into details on how to think about Product Lead role, and what does does it take to make the transition from a Sr. PM to a Product Lead. While the article goes into more details, some key elements it highlights include:
Scope: Shift from “depth in one type of product work” to “Breadth across multiple types of product work”
Coaching: Shift from just “being good at your job” to “training others to be good at theirs”
Influence: Shift from “solving with the resources you have” to “solving by allocating resources and influencing others”
📜 Strategy
The Secret to a Great Planning Process — Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite
tl;dr; Lenny and Nels write about the “W framework”, an idea they formed based on their experiences in previous product roles, and describe in detail how this framework helps in building a collaborative planning process across all levels within a company, along with highlighting some common pitfalls. The articles goes in detail, but for a quick summary the whole framework can be broken down into keys steps:
Context: Leadership and Executive team form a goal and strategy statement
Plans: Teams create proposed plans
Integration: Leadership integrates the proposed plans into one cohesive plan
Buy-in: Teams buy-in and set into execution
📜 Growth/Adoption/Retention:
Eliminate Churn Forever in 5 Simple Steps
Article: https://sixteenventures.com/eliminate-churn
tl;dr; Lincoln discusses in detail about Churn 🤕 and potential reasons why you might be experiencing churn in your product. One of the most important reasons churn happens is because customer’s don’t perceive they are able to achieve their desired outcome, or that your competitor has made it even easier. The article goes into details about 5 reasons mentioned below 👇🏽
You have Bad-fit Customers
You have a Broken or Incomplete Product or Service
You are providing an Inappropriate Experience for your Customers
You have No Real Understanding of what “Success” is for your Customer
You Have No Process to Make Customers Successful
Finding Language/Market Fit: How to Make Customers Feel Like You’ve Read Their Minds
tl;dr; Focusing on the customer problem, and articulating that in problem statement, helps better articulate the product goal. The article talks about attentional control or the scanning process which user’s use when they first see the product - the article describes this as the first hurdle in user funnel with the biggest drop-off. The articles talks about using frameworks like JTBD, which help not only build the problem statement, but also would help shaping the customer messaging, to help customers better resonate with the product. Over all the article suggests these basic steps to test and validate the language/market-fit:
Uncover user pain-points, hidden assumptions and goals via user interviews
Draft test messages based on interview learnings
Validate comprehension qualitatively
Test the language quantitatively using A/B testing and targeted ads
When you can understand and articulate your customers' goals and struggles and anxieties in simple, precise language, your developers and product teams will not have to guess at what to build.
📜 Design
Habit is a powerful product feature
Article: https://uxdesign.cc/habit-is-a-powerful-product-feature-a8f7dd300ce5
tl;dr; Lubomir talks in detail about the power of customer habits and how habit makes the most powerful product engagement driver. To build habits on any product, driving customer value via frameworks like jobs-to-be-done and reducing the friction to do repetitive tasks is of paramount importance. By focusing on frequent customers and prioritizing their needs, along with expanding your product to drive complementary value are some of the aspects PMs should look into. In the end Lubomir describes how building a habit increasing the switching costs for the customer, and thereby drive retention for your customer segments.
5 Prioritization Methods in UX Roadmapping
Article: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/prioritization-methods/
tl;dr; Sarah writes on nngroup blog about 5 prioritization methods to be used to build a UX roadmap. Sarah goes into details about
Impact–effort matrix: Can be used for collaborative quick prioritization discussions.
Feasibility, desirability, and viability scorecard: Ranking items by feasibility, desirability and viability helps sheds more light and enables informed decisions and removes any group biases.
RICE method: A good method for technical prioritization discussions. It goes into more details by including factors like (R)each, (I)mpact, (C)confidence and (E)ffort.
MoSCoW analysis: Good for user journey segmentation type prioritizations, and for prioritization discussions where a simplified approach and clear time frames are needed/available.
Kano model: A simplified model similar to RICE, which could be used by teams who find a hard time prioritizing based on user due to various reasons.
This is a really good article if you are looking for a quick rundown of methods which exist and how to execute them in a group setting.
📜 Fun Learnings:
🧠 How to Lead a Creative Mind Mapping Brainstorm using Mural
Thank you for reading this week! Have a wonderful thanksgiving week!