The Prodify Blog

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. After Morningstar acquired HelloWallet, there was a grand vision for how our two products would come together to provide even more value to consumers and clients.

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. One of the most fundamental experiences in an e-commerce product is called “finding,” showing buyers the items they’re looking for. At eBay, I was product manager on the finding team responsible for the item details page, which showed what sellers listed. Counterparts on my team included product managers for searching, browsing, the bidding flow, and so on. Our team collaborated well, worked hard, and learned a great deal from one another. We also made our share of mistakes.

“Don’t mistake activity for achievement.” -- John Wooden Unfortunately, it’s all too common for product organizations to focus on the wrong thing. In this case I’m not referring to building the wrong features, though that happens too. Specifically, many teams get caught up in how many features are launched rather than whether those features enhance the product in a significant way. It’s easier and sometimes more visible to ship a bunch of stuff, but that’s not always correlated with progress. At its worst, shipping too much can make the product worse by adding clutter and complexity that customers don’t find valuable. It’s harder to solve real problems in ways that are measurable, particularly since not all releases are successful in delivering a material impact. The best product teams judge themselves not by quantity or speed of releases (‘output”) but by how much those are adding value (“outcomes”). Here are ways to shift your focus towards what is really helping customers in ways that also improve your business.

My most rewarding yet challenging roles have been as part of a fast growing business. These come with an opportunity -- plus an expectation -- to grow the product team to fuel continued expansion. I’ve been lucky enough to see hyper-growth early in my career at eBay, as the first head of product at Groupon and most recently at Fetch Rewards. When your team scales rapidly, you outgrow the ability to be in the weeds on everything. Your focus will shift from being involved in defining requirements to setting up the team to manage the ever-growing demands. This is similar to the change of role as you progress from being a PM to a manager of PMs to a manager of managers -- though in this case the entire organization is undergoing rapid change simultaneously.  It’s been said that for product leaders, your team is your product. It should get deliberate attention to improve and evolve just as the product does. With that, here are implications for rapid growth of your team and how it relates to your individuals, organization, team culture -- and your own role.

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. Storyblocks is the world’s first stock media subscription service, offering video, audio, and images. We’ve worked with them since 2015 and as their CEO, TJ Leonard, put it,

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. CrossLead is a platform that helps organizations of all sizes plan, manage, and track progress toward achieving important company objectives. It was founded by Navy SEAL David Silverman, co-author of the bestseller Team of Teams, which details the military’s need to become nimbler and more flexible in order to successfully fight Al Qaeda. Many commercial organizations are faced with the challenge of making similar adaptations, but they lack the necessary software tools and frameworks, which CrossLead provides. Nevertheless, the CrossLead team did not see immediate market traction.

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. When I joined Adchemy, a twenty-five-person startup, in 2006, the company had already built ingenious machine learning technology capable of generating and optimizing billions of ads and landing pages every day. The promise of that technology led to multiple funding rounds and a $400 million valuation in 2009.

The following is adapted from Build What Matters. The Never-Ending Customer Commitment Cycle I vividly remember joining Opower as the VP of product in early 2010. In my second week, the board requested to see a product roadmap. Scrambling to deliver, the obvious starting point was learning from the team what had already been planned. In doing so, I discovered two surprising facts:

A few years ago there was a new phrase that made its rounds through the product management community:  “love the problem, not the solution.”  That is, make sure you’re solving a problem for customers, and have a deep understanding of that problem.  Focus on the problem over your product (the solution).  All great advice.  But I’ve seen teams struggle when applying it.  In this post, I’ll talk about 3 common issues I see with this concept.

Kano Model Overview The Kano Model is a theory developed in the 1980s by Professor Noriaki Kano to categorize customer satisfaction of product benefits into different categories.  The key concepts include: