Surviving 2025 as a PM 💪, Founder-style leadership ✨, Partnerships for PMs 🤝💼, Strategies to monetize AI features in SaaS 🤖💰, and more
Weekly Roundup 25 - December 15, 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! 😎
Can you believe we’re already counting down the final days of 2024? I, for one, am excited for the holidays and to take some time off.
This is the second-to-last Weekly Roundup before taking a writing break for the holidays. After next week’s edition, the Weekly Roundup will return to your inbox on January 12, 2025.
With that said, let’s dive in.
This Week's Roundup 🔁
Surviving 2025 as a Product Manager — or anyone in tech, really.
5 + 1 predictions for venture studios in 2025.
Partnerships for product managers.
The best growth advice of 2024.
Three proven strategies to monetize AI features in SaaS.
Finding your ideal customer profile in B2B: Interview questions & guide.
How to implement product principles so you stop struggling with decisions.
Founder-style leadership.
Pricing roadmap: How to be strategic instead of reactive.
Surviving 2025 as a Product Manager — or anyone in tech, really (5 min read)
Adapting to a challenging tech landscape requires a blend of business acumen, versatility, AI proficiency, and strong relationships. Prioritize understanding your organization's commercial goals and focus on delivering impact with fewer resources. Embrace a "full-stack" mindset—developing skills beyond your core role increases your value. Experiment with AI tools to stay competitive and understand their real-world applications. Build genuine connections by networking or organizing events to expand opportunities. Finally, prepare for setbacks by diversifying your interests and nurturing resilience.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Build adaptability by expanding your skillset, integrating AI into your workflows, and prioritizing meaningful relationships to navigate the evolving tech landscape.
5 + 1 predictions for venture studios in 2025 (6 min read)
The venture studio landscape is expanding, with more vertical, geographic, and corporate-specific studios emerging. Specialization and solving "boring problems" will be key to scalability and differentiation. Venture capitalists are warming to the model but remain wary of cap table equity issues, even as some launch their own studios. Modest capital inflows will support the industry, though confusion about its definition limits investor confidence. Operational costs make sustainability tough, leading to more failures. Performance data remains murky, complicating validation of the model. Transparency in deal terms and cap tables is critical for building trust and competing effectively.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Build a clear value proposition with a niche focus, prioritize transparency in your equity structures, and address operational sustainability to navigate the evolving venture studio space.
Partnerships for product managers (6 min read)
Partnerships are essential for delivering integrated solutions, driving innovation, and expanding into new markets. Product managers are crucial to moving partnerships from announcements to operational success by managing risks, aligning goals, and fostering collaboration. Developing a partnership playbook helps document strategy, manage risks, and lay the groundwork for scalability. Clear roles, shared goals, and strong cross-functional collaboration ensure partnerships deliver value, not just promises. Effective management of partnerships can transform them into true win-win outcomes that keep products competitive and innovative.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Build a partnership playbook to align teams, mitigate risks, and consistently deliver measurable outcomes for long-term success.
The best growth advice of 2024 (6 min read)
This article shares 24 proven growth tactics used by leading companies like Canva, Calendly, and Clay, covering strategies from finding product-market fit (PMF) to embracing automation. Key takeaways include running long-term retention sprints, leveraging white-glove onboarding for deep customer insights, disrupting existing categories instead of creating new ones, and focusing on account-based growth strategies like intimate events and unified GTM metrics. For monetization, tactics such as reverse trials, charging based on work units, and automatic fee increases showed impactful results. Efficiency and automation hacks include combating fake accounts, simplifying user onboarding, and revamping email and cancellation flows for better engagement and retention.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Implement growth strategies tailored to your stage, such as validating PMF through waitlists, improving lead qualification processes, or optimizing pricing models to align with customer value. Use automation to reduce operational overhead and focus resources on scalable wins.
Three proven strategies to monetize AI features in SaaS (6 min read)
AI in SaaS is rapidly evolving, with three monetization strategies emerging: embedding AI into existing pricing tiers (core, differentiating, or premium features), leveraging usage-based pricing (consumption or outcome-driven models), and add-ons (seat-based or hybrid). While content tools are the most monetized use case, AI is expanding into data analysis, customer support, development, and security. Monetization lags behind adoption due to complexities in billing systems, but usage-based and add-on pricing are closing the gap. The SaaS landscape is moving toward broader AI applications beyond content generation.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Align pricing strategies with the value AI features deliver. Test hybrid or add-on models for flexibility while iterating on billing systems to support emerging trends like outcome-based pricing.
Finding your ideal customer profile in B2B: Interview questions & guide (7 min read)
Defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) goes beyond firmographics; it's about understanding what truly motivates and challenges your buyers. Use structured interviews to dig deeper into five key areas:
Learning Patterns: Where they gather industry insights.
Industry Context: Broad challenges and objections.
Roles in the Organization: Their responsibilities and influence in decision-making.
Goals and Challenges: Their objectives and barriers.
Decision-making Process: How products are discovered, evaluated, and purchased. The goal isn't just collecting data but uncovering real stories that reveal use cases, emotional triggers, and motivations. This framework helps focus your efforts on what truly matters to your most valuable customers.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Conduct buyer interviews to uncover specific use cases and emotional drivers behind customer behaviour. Focus on what your customers truly care about to sharpen your product, growth, and sales strategies.
How to implement product principles so you stop struggling with decisions (5 min read)
Decision-making is a major hurdle in product development, and product principles simplify this process by aligning teams and enabling faster progress. Craft principles tailored to your context by defining customer priorities, experience goals, boundaries, and quality standards. Collaborate with teams and leadership to ensure relevance and adoption. Review principles every three months for impact and usability. Categorizing principles into layers such as strategy, discovery, delivery, and collaboration makes them more actionable and applicable in daily work.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Collaborate with leadership and teams to craft context-specific product principles. Regularly review and adapt them to simplify decision-making and foster team alignment for smoother product development.
Founder-style leadership (9 min read)
Founder-style leadership, driven by deep product sense and strong coaching skills, is crucial for empowering teams at startups and scaling organizations. It prioritizes hands-on customer engagement, iterative learning, and mentoring to build product expertise and team autonomy. Unlike professional management, which often lacks product intuition, this approach fosters innovation and sustainable growth by ensuring leaders actively guide teams with context and strategy.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Develop product sense through direct user engagement and team collaboration. Hone coaching skills to empower teams with the context and support they need to thrive.
Pricing roadmap: How to be strategic instead of reactive (4 min read)
Smaller companies often neglect pricing strategy due to time constraints, limited expertise, and lack of ownership. However, pricing is a critical revenue lever that must evolve with new features, competitive changes, inflation, and bundling opportunities. A roadmap prevents dramatic price hikes that alienate customers and aligns pricing with product roadmaps. Tom Buiocchi's framework outlines categories like new products, bundling, and portfolio reviews to maintain proactive planning and avoid fragmented, reactive decisions that hurt profitability and trust.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Develop a pricing roadmap with clear ownership and input from all teams. Regular updates will help capture value, counter costs, and keep customers engaged while outpacing competitors.
👋 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 ✌️
This week is packed with ideas for product managers!
Thank you for the shout out on partnerships for product managers 🙏
Love the actionable takeaways!