Move your Product Management career forward

When we sat down with Roll20.net product director Kenton Hansen for this week’s podcast, we were hoping to hear tales of how he and his product team (or band of adventurers!) went on quests to conduct user research. We wanted to hear about dodging orcs and dragons (stakeholders) while collecting treasure (insights). Instead, we learned that it’s only Roll20’s marketing team that cast spells. But we also learned a lot about conducting research for such a large, passionate community, qualifying candidates, sharing learnings, and much more.

What exactly do you do when you’re in the process of scaling fast and a pandemic strikes?

Here’s a sentence that always fills me with dread: “We plan to adopt this new approach, just as soon as we launch these must-have features.” The must-have feature list (AKA catch-up features) has become my nemesis—it’s forever standing in the way of progress. Usually it’s a laundry list of things copied from leading competitors, from user requests, and from customer RFPs. The things that everyone is doing, and that the company believes without which you’re not a true player. You cannot sell a car unless it has lights, a steering wheel, and safety belts, right?

Having a bias to action is more helpful than discussing and researching everything prior. Quantity beats quality in learning. Action beats perfection.

Ben Foster has more than 20 years of product management experience. He was formerly a senior product manager at eBay, vice president of product at Opower, and chief product officer at GoCanvas. Here’s how he got his most recent job in product as a CPO at WHOOP.

A list of 199 SaaS tools to aid in your product-led growth journey. While not every tool included on this list pertains exclusively to product-led growth, each one listed provides a solution to a problem you've likely stumbled across.

Changing to an empowered product-team model represents a major cultural and behavioral change, and much of this change necessarily needs to start at the very top. Unfortunately it’s not as easy as saying “just back off and give the people space to do their work.”

You’ve probably heard that a short time to market is essential if you’re to succeed — which is why you chose to build a lean, user-centric MVP. After all, in an ecosystem where 90% of startups fail, it’s best to test quickly and fail or succeed sooner rather than later. So, you want to know how long it will take for you to build an MVP and put it into the hands of your users.

GoPractice spoke with Andrey Novoselsky, the head of advertising at VK (the biggest social network in Russia) from 2014 to 2021.

Momentum is everything in startups . It creates the Universal Growth Loop. But just like with any growth loop , the loop can work for you or against you. The effects aren't linear, they compound. That means losing momentum doesn't make things incrementally harder, it makes them exponentially harder