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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…
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The Metric That Keeps Product Teams From Optimizing the Wrong Thing
Early in my career, I thought every product initiative needed one success metric. If we wanted to improve activation, we’d measure activation. If we wanted to increase feature adoption, we’d measure adoption. If we wanted to improve conversions, we’d focus on conversion rate. It sounded logical. Until one experiment taught me otherwise. We redesigned part…
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Beyond Monthly Dashboards: How I Measure Long-Term Product Success
One of the first product dashboards I built made me feel good. Daily active users were growing. Feature adoption was increasing. The latest release had performed well. Every metric suggested we were heading in the right direction. Then, six months later, reality caught up with us. Customers weren’t renewing at the rate we expected. Support…
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The Signals That Numbers Can’t Show: Recognizing Qualitative Product-Market Fit
When Product Managers talk about Product-Market Fit, the conversation usually revolves around metrics. Retention. Revenue. Growth. Net Revenue Retention. Churn. Those metrics are important, and they absolutely deserve attention. But some of the strongest signs that you’re building something customers truly value don’t appear in a dashboard. They show up in conversations. Over the years,…