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Here’s a human-style version with a practical Product Manager perspective and a little personal experience woven in.
Stop Asking What Customers Want. Ask What They’re Trying to Get Done. One of the biggest changes in how I approach product discovery came when I started looking beyond what customers were asking for. Earlier in my product career, I would often ask customers questions like: “What feature would you like us to build?” The…
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Product Reliability: The Feature Customers Notice When It Fails
I once had a customer tell me something that sounded almost too simple: “We don’t need the product to surprise us. We need it to work.” That sentence stayed with me. As Product Managers, we naturally spend a lot of time thinking about what’s next. New features, better experiences, AI capabilities, integrations, and ambitious roadmaps.…
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DAU/MAU Can Tell You How Sticky Your Product Is, But Not Why
One of the first product metrics I remember getting excited about was DAU/MAU. The number looked simple. Daily Active Users divided by Monthly Active Users. One percentage that seemed to answer a big question: “How often are people coming back to our product?” It is useful. But after working with product metrics for a while,…
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Are You Solving Customer Problems or Just Building Features?
One question has stayed with me throughout my journey as a Product Manager. “If we didn’t build this feature, what customer problem would remain unsolved?” It sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly difficult to answer. Early in my career, I spent a lot of time discussing features. Roadmaps were filled with requests from customers, ideas from…
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The Hidden Cost of Becoming a Feature Factory
Early in my product management career, I thought productivity looked something like this: More roadmap items completed. More features released. More sprint goals achieved. If we were shipping consistently, we were succeeding. At least that’s what I believed. Then something unexpected happened. Despite delivering features almost every sprint, customer satisfaction barely improved. Support tickets kept…