When I'm evaluating an investment for Long Journey Ventures, one of my favorite questions to ask is: "Out of all the things you could spend your time on, why this company?"

Product managers are not just in charge of the products they build - they’re also in charge of the processes and systems around them, as they continue to unlock multiplicative value for their company. Based on my experiences, I’ve found that there’s a rarely-discussed cost when it comes to shipping more and more products. That cost is what I call coordination cost.

With every new major acquisition channel that emerges, we see massive new companies emerge with it. This has proven to be true time and time again. But choosing, testing and scaling emerging acquisition channels is incredibly hard.

We started The Review back in 2013 with a lofty goal — to unlock access to career-changing, 1:1 coffee chats with a trusted mentor. Eight years and almost 500 profiles later, we’ve had the opportunity to interview an incredible range of folks with all sorts of company-building advice.

With no self-imposed time pressure, I was able to focus on just one thing: showing up every day and writing some code. Some features took an hour to implement, some took several hours spread over days, some even stretched into weeks, but it did not matter because there were no deadlines of any sort. Looking back, I cannot believe how much I’ve been able to ship over the past 6 years by just following this one rule.

When you actually launch new products to customers (which many teams don’t do), product managers and designers that have focused on scaling issues and optimization have to flex a new type of cross-functional muscle: how to work with product marketing

Sooner or later, someone’s going to ask “when will Feature X ship?” There are situations where having an answer – an accurate one – is non-negotiable.

Community is the “new” moat (or so some have said), and it’s true: Having a community helps protect against competitor companies or products entering your territory. Whether that community is a group of power users, open source contributors, creators, or even just a brand (or franchise)’s super fans, it lends greater brand awareness, higher switching costs, and scale economies.

If you are wondering what feature creep is, chances are that you have experienced it, possibly without even realizing it.

What’s our biggest problem today? What’s our best asset today? That perspective is not so useful, however, when planning for where you want to be tomorrow. It’s not about where you are, it’s about where you’re headed, and how fast you’re getting there.

A model explaining product design as a stack of decisions built on top of a stack of knowledge. With apologies to Jesse James Garrett.

I'd like to share an exercise I use during my North Star Framework workshops. The exercise is valuable no matter which framework you end up using.

In this doc, we’ll look at the “what” and “how” of pre-mortems, along with a novel technique of using Tigers, Paper Tigers, and Elephants to run effective pre-mortems. My aim here is to be as concrete as possible so that you can take the steps described here and run your very first pre-mortem this week.

How a Scrappy Utah Software Company Ignored Every Silicon Valley Heuristic and Won Anyway

In this article, I’d like to discuss one of the very common questions I get from people that are unfortunately working on feature teams: “Does the concept of product discovery even apply to feature teams?”

We work tirelessly on growth models for our companies, focusing on creating sustainable, predictable, and defensible tactics to ensure lasting success. Yet when it comes to our own careers, we let luck and intuition guide our decision-making process. If we are evaluating ourselves as a product or business, we are either terrible, or absent, CEOs who hold our own career decision-making process to a lower standard.

One of the things that I was trying to get at in Product Development as Iterated Taste was this idea that all product validation methodologies consist of two parts: an explicitly followable process, and a tacit component that may be best described as ‘having good product judgment’, or ‘product taste’. Following the explicit process would only do you so good; there’s still a tacit component to learn that is important if you want to be repeatably successful in creating new products.

When kicking of a new product or initiative, our job as PMs involves providing the right guidance for what, when and why something needs to be built.

Behind the scenes with the team that launched Slack Huddles

A team member at Amplitude recently asked the following question: How do you figure out whether teams are more mature or less mature so quickly?

Much has been written about how to find and select your Co-Founder — and that’s important — but what’s rarely covered, yet equally important, is how to manage the relationship over time.

SaaS businesses dominated the tech IPO market over the past few years. Will Product-Led-Growth (PLG) businesses do the same in the coming decade? I believe so.

When learning to ride a motorcycle, you’re taught that where your eyes go, your bike goes. Look to your right and you’ll drift right. Look left, go left. There’s a lot of power in where you focus your attention. That’s why nailing your North Star Metric(s) — the top-line metrics that all company priorities are aligned around — is so crucial.

The basics of good design are often ignored. But it’s time for companies and consumers to start demanding more.

Buy-in is the lifeblood of Product Management. I learned this the hard way.