PM theater 🎭, Balancing product discovery & delivery ⚖️, To freemium or not to freemium 🆓, Receiving feedback 📥, and more
Weekly Roundup 17 - September 22, 2024
👋 Hey, Sam here! Welcome back to the 🔁 Weekly Roundup edition 🔁 of The Product Trench. Each week, I curate deep dives, trends and resources related to product management and leadership.
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Happy Sunday everyone! 😎
It has been a good week of product content, and I tried to capture my favourites, so let's just get to it.
This Week's Roundup 🔁
Surprising lessons from 20,000 experiments.
Unfortunate startup pivots.
12 proven sources of insights to fuel your product discovery.
3 tools to manage up easily.
Why is everyone hating on product managers?
Stop learning to give feedback. Learn to receive it.
How to balance product discovery with product delivery.
Should your new feature be free or paid?
Surprising lessons from 20,000 experiments (4 min read)
Simplifying your website, marketing emails, and landing pages often leads to better conversions. Data from over 20,000 experiments shows that adding features like social proof on pricing pages, homepage videos, and strikethrough pricing rarely improves results. Users respond better to simple, functional designs that get to the point, whether that's through unformatted emails, straightforward landing pages, or clear, concise messaging. The focus should be on guiding users to complete core actions without distraction.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Apply simplicity to every touchpoint—whether it's a landing page, email, or website. Remove unnecessary features to keep users engaged and focused on conversions.
Unfortunate startup pivots (2 min read)
Some startup pivots are often doomed to fail, such as shifting from B2B to consumer, adding chat/social features, or bolting on trendy tech like AI. These pivots fail because they often ignore core product issues and retention problems. Premature platform pivots and going from paid to free also typically fall flat. Successful pivots often zoom in on existing high-engagement users or adapt to adjacent, established market categories.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Focus on solving core product problems instead of adding features or chasing trends when considering a pivot.
12 proven sources of insights to fuel your product discovery (5 min read)
Product discovery thrives on diverse data:
Core sources include customer interviews, surveys, and analytics to grasp user behaviours, motivations, and pain points.
Social listening, market research, and competitor benchmarking add external context, while internal insights come from stakeholders and user feedback.
Additionally, AI-driven tools like synthetic user research offer innovative ways to simulate and validate ideas.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Use varied insight channels, from user feedback to data analytics, to uncover opportunities and refine your product strategy.
3 tools to manage up easily (5 min read)
Managing up is crucial for career growth and autonomy. Robert Ta, Senior Staff Product Fellow at Dayforce, highlights three tools:
Ask yourself three questions to align with your leader's priorities, help them succeed, and make their life easier.
Create a "Boss Agreement" through intentional meetings to clarify expectations, success metrics, and decision boundaries.
Implement a bi-weekly Progress Report to maintain alignment, build trust, and provide performance evidence for promotions or reviews. Misaligned expectations can harm trust and performance, so clear communication is key.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Define your boss's success criteria and deliver routine progress reports to ensure alignment, reduce micromanagement, and build trust for future autonomy.
Why is everyone hating on product managers? (3 min read)
The article argues that PMs need to shift away from focusing on internal rituals and roadmaps and prioritize real customer value. It suggests avoiding unsustainable hypergrowth trends, choosing work environments that align with personal values, and steering clear of toxic leadership. PMs should also reduce over-planning, communicate effectively across teams, and build hands-on product skills.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Focus on execution and customer needs over frameworks, and select leaders and environments that promote genuine product development over bureaucracy.
Stop learning to give feedback. Learn to receive it. (6 min read)
Most people know how to give feedback but struggle to receive it. Defensiveness blocks growth. To improve, assume positive intent, turn initial defensiveness into curiosity, and ask for specific examples. Managing facial expressions and body language helps build psychological safety, encouraging more honest conversations. Listening doesn't mean you must act on all feedback immediately; instead, gather data and decide later. Mastering feedback reception enhances relationships and strengthens leadership.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Focus on building curiosity over defensiveness when receiving feedback, and always reward honesty with positive engagement.
How to balance product discovery with product delivery (5 min read)
Balancing product discovery and delivery is crucial to building valuable digital products. Focusing solely on delivery can result in backlogs of unnecessary features and missed opportunities, while overemphasizing discovery can lead to lack of tangible progress. To achieve balance, teams should split responsibilities between discovery and delivery, with constant communication and a shared goal. Use a product trio (product manager, designer, and engineer) for discovery, while ensuring delivery teams understand the problem space. Both groups should collaborate to evaluate and iterate based on real customer and business value.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Split your team's time between discovery and delivery, ensure shared goals, and measure value created from each feature, not just the speed of delivery.
Should your new feature be free or paid? (4 min read)
Deciding whether to make a new feature free or paid hinges on factors like retention, virality, and competitive positioning. Free features boost engagement, virality, and future conversion opportunities, while gating complex or niche features can create paid value. Freemium should be seen as a business strategy, not just a conversion tool, and innovation in the free tier can shape your brand's perception. Considering factors like feature complexity and uniqueness helps make these decisions clearer.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Evaluate new features for retention, virality, and market competitiveness before deciding to gate them.
👋 That's it for this week's edition. Thank you for reading, and enjoy your week.
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See you next time.
— Sam ✌️
Thank you for the product management articles this week! Your summary and actionable steps are helpful.
I appreciate the shoutout on managing up for product managers!