How To Product

So our last episode convinced you to prioritize product speed — what can go wrong? Turns out, a lot. In this episode, we share the common pitfalls we’ve seen in prioritizing speed — from the dozens of tiny features that together drag down your performance, to the fact that you might need to cut some features to actually make things fast again.

We all agree that speed and responsiveness are critical to making a product great. But how do you know which parts of your product to optimize and what to set as a goal? In this episode, we discuss with our special guest Ryan, who spent years as a PM entirely focused on speed and performance.

When do you run an A/B test vs just rolling out a feature? When does user testing help? The answer is when you need to know something. In this episode, we explain the types of unknowns you face when launching a new product of feature and how to use the tools at your disposal to most efficiently find your answers.

Good products feel great to use. They’re fast and responsive. Every interaction is a mini-delight. They feel unbreakable. But how do you as a PM get that good product feel in your product? From performance targets to cutting jank — we’re here to help!

Good products have great design (and no, we’re not talking about beauty, but that’s important, too). Introducing, the How To Product 15 min design crash course. We’ll give you the concepts you need to understand what separates brilliant design from a confusing mess. We’ll cover discoverability, simplicity, and feedback.

In a previous episode, we mentioned that great products solved a real, user problem better than it ever had been solved before. This episode is all about that one word: better. What made Facebook better than Myspace? What made Gmail better than Yahoo Mail? What is the toolbox you can draw from to make sure your product isn’t just a copycat with a different skin?

Good products don’t always stay good. One pernicious cause of product rot is feature creep. Don’t make the mistakes we did! In this episode, how to handle power user features, how to say No, and why every product evolves to add messaging.

Sounds obvious but it’s easy to forget: good products solve real, human problems. But how do you find these problems? Worse how do you make sure you and your team aren’t chasing “mirage value” — something that seems like a real problem but really isn’t? Plus, hear some of our stories about “us” problems, a particular kind of mirage value where you solve your company’s problems instead of your users’.

Otherwise known as PM’ing on hard mode. At some point you’ll need to work with a distributed team. We talk about the 24 hour rule for making decisions, the extra importance of squashing ambiguity, and how important it is to rep your teams work back at the home office.

As a PM, trust is your currency. You can have the greatest ideas in the world, but if nobody trusts that you know what you’re doing or trust that you’ll do what you say you’ll do, nothing is going to happen. We share our tips for building trust on a new team. Do talk to everyone and get to know them. Do be useful from the beginning, even if it is something small. Definitely don’t tell people you’ll do something then not do it.

As a PM, you build features that you hope will have an impact. But how do you know if your feature helped or was a flop. The answer is experiments. We run through the basics of A/B testing and share plenty of stories about where we went wrong in the past.

It’s launch day, so you better bring the donuts. We talk about how to make sure your launch goes smoothly, how to make sure everything worked, and what to do next.

Everybody’s excited and working on your feature! What can possibly go wrong now? Answer: a lot. In this episode we walk through the common issues you run into during implementation – from rabbit holes to endless edge cases – we cover how to spot these problems and deal with them.