Working with data helps companies across the board to unlock their potential and become more productive and better at making decisions. However, making people in the team and company rely on data involves a lot of work. Product managers must often set a strategy, reinvent processes, and change organizational behavior. 

Today’s post considers what to do when you encounter pushback or resistance from outside the product trio, especially when it comes to conducting customer interviews.

Product managers are in high demand while their job descriptions vary greatly. Here are 5 things that product managers should never be asked to do.

Consider your neighborhood supermarket. When you walk in, you see somewhere between 40,000 – 50,000 products. How do you decide which to buy? Do you buy products you already know? How often do you buy something you haven’t tried before or substitute a product with something new?

Activation is a very important part of the product. All new users are exposed to the activation and onboarding process. So, even small improvements in this area affect all the key elements of the growth model: retention, monetization, user acquisition, etc. This is why product teams invest significant resources in building and optimizing the activation in the product.

Gen Z now makes up a large part of the workforce. Use this Gen Z playbook to motivate, develop, & retain the next generation of talent!

Cable companies survived the great unbundling thanks to selling Internet service; they may be best place to make the bundle of the future.

Instead, look at org design and incentives

As product leaders, our professional lives are full of constraints. What’s possible to develop, what can be measured, what management wants, and the list goes on. We are so used to working within these constraints that we sometimes forget to even consider a better alternative. Here are a few places where you don’t want to make this mistake.

It's important that decision-makers understand how the highest-paid person in the office (HiPPO) can negatively affect customers and the product team.

The problem I have with personas, what I recommend instead, and how you can actually use them together to articulate user information more clearly.

Here are the 7 steps to take when receiving a product manager job offer.

Messes, Action, and Junk Drawers

Embracing good conflict can lead to better results & stronger teams. Learn how to operationalize good conflict in your company with the Rubber Band Theory!

Getting to the next level unlocks a lot – more money, more responsibility, more respect, a feeling of progress – and even if you care deeply about other things (your product, your users, etc), you can’t really avoid caring about promotion as well. This post talks a bit about the (well-known) issues with this type of culture, and suggests some alternatives for startups not looking to replicate it.

In the Tools of the Trade series, we talk with different product professionals to explore how they approach continuous discovery and which tools facilitate this process for them.

If you begin to view customer service as an extension of the product organization, the benefits compound to allow both teams to better accomplish their goals — and improve customer satisfaction overall.

Data is an essential part of the work of every product manager. It helps to form and validate hypotheses, provide more insights about user behavior, and make better decisions and track product changes. But the misuse of data can be harmful. One important example is selecting only data that confirms a particular hypothesis and ignores relevant contradictory evidence.

Small things that you need to cull from your life

The classic approaches of "managing" stakeholders don't work. These techniques will help you break the walls, and get into deep partnership.

I recently saw a video from YC. It was a YC alumni talking about 'Growth vs Profit', and she was rationalizing about how focusing on growth first and having a 'plausible profitability story' is enough. She goes on to conclude that focusing growth is more important than profitability. This is where my alarm bells started to go off.

In this article, we discuss the “growth product manager” role, how and when it appeared, and how it differs from the roles of marketing managers and core product managers. We will also examine the main tools that growth product managers use.

After an 11-year career as an HR exec at Splunk, Shreya Iyer unpacks her comprehensive guide to startup career growth, with tailored tips for candidates approaching career planning, managers looking to retain top talent, and startups carving out their career development plans.

Benchmarks and insights from the world’s best investors

In the many large-scale eyetracking studies that Nielsen Norman Group conducted since 2006, there was one recurring fundamental finding. That is, people are more likely to scan than read word for word. Most users arrive on a website with a goal in mind and scan for keywords that point them to what they are looking at.