The Evolution of Positioning as Startups Grow One thing I’ve noticed about startups is that the product rarely stays the same for long. The customer changes. The market changes. The product becomes more capable. New competitors appear. What once made the company different can eventually become table stakes. Yet sometimes the positioning stays exactly where…
How to Read a Funnel One thing I learned pretty early in product management is that a funnel looks simple until you actually have to figure out what is happening inside it. You have users entering at the top, users moving through different steps, and eventually some of them reaching the outcome you care about.…
Early in my product career, I assumed that talking to 10 or 15 customers would give me a reasonable picture of what users wanted. Then I learned an uncomfortable lesson: the people you talk to can matter just as much as what they tell you. If your sample doesn’t represent the broader user population, even…
Early in my product career, I spent a lot of time looking at dashboards. Usage was up. Conversion had improved. Retention was moving in the right direction. On paper, everything looked fine. Then we spoke to customers. The story wasn’t quite as positive. Customers were completing the workflow, but many found parts of it confusing.…
For a long time, customer segmentation seemed straightforward. Industry. Company size. Job title. Location. Age. These categories are easy to collect and even easier to put into a spreadsheet. But while working on products, I’ve found that these labels often tell us less than we expect. Two customers can have the same job title, work…