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Make New Programs Succeed​.

Machine Learning Cheat Sheet For PMs and Business Owners

1/2/2023

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You can't be a PM or business owner without a deep understanding of machine learning: establishing the business value and then rallying a team to deliver to that value without falling into the many unique pitfalls of ML programs. Here is a "cheat sheet" compilation of how to deliver machine learning products and programs, highlighting practical tips from someone who's been on the journey.

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A Single-Threaded Owner's Guide To Strategy

12/26/2022

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Strategic planning is hard, but everyone thinks they can do it themselves. 

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How to Find Real Use Cases for a New Technology

10/31/2022

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It's never a great sign when the Product Manager is handed a technology with an assignment of "figuring out the use cases". ​Great products should be a labor of love, the result of an entrepreneurial person who felt the pain of a problem first-hand, or had great empathy for someone else's problem, and then passionately invested time and energy to solve that problem.

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10 Ways To Predict What Customers Want

9/27/2022

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Product leaders know they need to tailor their roadmap to customer demand. They base these decisions on market intelligence from the usual sources:
  • sales team
  • analyst reports
  • competitor web sites
  • existing customers
  • product usage analytics (in SaaS)
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These sources are important, but are often indirect and lagging information, not to mention other biases. For those that just want to appease their boss, this may be enough. What you release next may or may not be successful, but at least you can show that you based your roadmap on sources. But for those that really care about a product that sells and users love, you need to balance this with more direct and predictive sources of intelligence.

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The Complete Guide to Customer Interviews for Product Management

9/8/2022

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​Talking to customers to uncover unmet needs is one of the most exciting parts of product management. It's being a detective! Hunting down members of your target audience for meetings, and, once there, asking them the right questions to get to the root of what they really care about.

But most PMs find it difficult to book customer interviews on a regular basis. And even when you do land a customer interview - how do you carry it out? What questions do you ask?

​This article is a step-by-step guide to landing and executing customer interviews - taking the stress out of it and making it fun! 

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Customer Research Interview Guidelines and Pitfalls

8/18/2022

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Talking to customers to uncover unmet needs is the most critical part of product strategy. The key to growth is a deep understanding of your target customers. Simply relying on internal ideas is not enough, nor is it enough to just look at google analytics and product usage data. You actually have to talk to the market.

Read my article The Complete Guide to Customer Interviews That Drive Product-Market Fit. When you get to the customer interview, take heed of these crucial guidelines! 

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How To Not Flatline (And Achieve Continuous Organic Growth)

5/6/2021

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Product and service offerings follow a growth lifecycle:
  1. Product/market fit - you have a great idea but need to figure out the formula for repeatable growth - what market, what problem are you solving, who will pay for that, how to monetize, how to make it a repeatable formula. Many startups fail if they can't figure this out.
  2. Growth - once you figure out the formula, you can scale up sales, marketing and product to operationalize the growth, meeting quarterly targets. Riding this wave, owners need to judge whether and when to sell, or keep going.
  3. Flatline and Decline - eventually, offerings hit a flatline period where their traditional markets are starting to be saturated, commoditized, or disrupted. Growth is hard, your operational leaders are hammering away at what used to work, wondering why it's not generating the same result, all the while playing politics to stay afloat. 
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Once you hit Flatline and Decline, it is very hard to bounce back. Stories of flatlining businesses that suddenly take off again are rare indeed. While there are ways to resuscitate a flatlining business, the ideal is to NEVER GET THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE and instead take the right actions to ensure continuous growth.
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How to Transform Legacy to SaaS: A Blueprint

3/29/2021

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SaaS businesses are all the rage! Even companies that have success with traditional products are re-thinking their business as a SaaS offering, to reap the many benefits:
  • Valuation. Even if all you sell is basically the same product to the same customers, but on a "SaaS" model, that can be enough to attract new investors and increase your valuation by an order of magnitude.
  • Recurring revenue. SaaS implies a subscription model, which lends itself to more recurring revenue, or at least more predictable recurring revenue.
  • Additional revenue streams. SaaS businesses can collect and monetize anonymized customer data, including patterns of customer behaviour. They can serve ads to different customer segments, or upsell partnering products.
  • Product stickiness. Customer behaviour data can be analyzed to quickly assess how to make the product more sticky. Feature "experiments" can be run on different customer segments.
  • Reduced operational costs. Cloud technology can theoretically allow for a zero IT footprint on the client site, reducing deployment and support costs. And because SaaS is also usually "self-service" ie. purchased and upgraded directly online, it can reduce sales overhead as well.
  • Access to new markets, such as SME and mid-market customers that increasingly buy only SaaS.
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These benefits are so attractive that every and any product and business model is being re-imagined as SaaS, leading to some great ideas (e.g. Spotify, Coursera, bacon-of-the-month dropped off at your doorstep!). But not every business lends itself intuitively to a SaaS model. Especially if you have years of legacy technology and processes established with an existing customer base, the transition won't happen overnight. There are key questions to answer in each facet of the business.

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What is a Program Manager?

2/3/2021

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A Program Manager is responsible for managing multiple interrelated streams of work and ensuring that - taken together - they produce specific business outcomes and benefits for an organization. 

However the title "Program Manager" is not very common. Organizations have Project Managers, Product Managers, General Managers. But apart from some large organizations, "Program Manager" is rare. This is because often executives and middle managers play the role of Program Manager even if they don't have the title.

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Identify Your "Must-Have" Customers

12/23/2020

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Who are the people that can't live without your product? Why is that product a must-have for them? And what is the difference between these must-have users compared to other users for whom it's just a nice-to-have? These questions are at the root of scaling growth. Find your must-have users.

Yet, when planning target markets, it’s human nature to want to go broad. There is a feeling of safety and comfort. “Why, my product has hundreds of uses, for everyone! Let me list the ways…” But one of the great paradoxes of growth is that, in general, the more broadly you define target markets, the less business you actually take in. It literally pays to get more targeted.

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How To Infuse Customer Insights Into Your Strategy

12/18/2020

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Now that you've read the The Complete Guide to Customer Research Interviews, you know that gathering intelligence from customer interviews, market analysis, online research, win/loss analysis, is critical to developing a strategy that drives product-market fit and growth. But once you have accumulated all your customer and market insights, what do you actually do with it? Here are 5 immediate steps to infuse your strategy with intelligence in practice.

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"How Would You Feel if You Couldn't Use The Product Anymore?"

5/22/2020

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"How would you feel if you couldn't use the product anymore?" According to growth hacking pioneer Sean Ellis, this is the question to ask to determine your level of product-market fit. In response, you are looking for at least 40% of your customer base who say they would be "very disappointed". This represents user passion.

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Who Knows Customer Pain Points? Customer Success Knows.

12/10/2019

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As a product leader, you need customer intelligence to plan your strategy. But the customer data you collect from sales is biased. The data you get from market analysts is indirect. Even the data you collect yourself from customer interviews can be artificial, as customers are all too willing to be positive and tell you what you want to hear.

But there is one undeniable source of raw unfiltered customer intelligence that is too often overlooked - the Customer Success team. The Customer Success team gets customers when they are at their most passionate, emotional, even angry. Where there's emotion, there's usually a real pain point. It's rare to find that sort of honesty elsewhere.

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A CIO’s Roadmap to Legacy Transformation

9/17/2019

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As a CIO, if your enterprise relies on solutions that look like something out of the 1990s, it's often because that's exactly what they are. These applications - ERPs and home-grown core operations systems met an immediate business need at the time, then layer upon layer was built on top and entrenched into the foundational processes of the business. Now you are at a catch-22: pressure to modernize to meet the growing digital needs of the enterprise, while at the same time not risking the legacy software that is vital to day-to-day operations. 
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How do you prioritize legacy transformation as part of a digital transformation roadmap?

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How to Deliver Fast wtih a Large Team of UX Designers, Data Scientists, Software Developers and QA

2/20/2019

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One of the biggest challenges of modern software creation is having multiple team members — product managers, UX designers, data scientists, software developers, QA — working in parallel rather than sequentially. The world would be a much simpler place if the Product Manager completed a detailed requirements definition, then handed it off to data scientists who prototyped and refined their algorithms, then handed off to UX designers to create the full design, who then handed it off to development to build, who then handed off to QA for testing. 
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Unfortunately this is not the world we live in. Every software initiative is a race to getting value into the hands of users, and building sequentially is not an option. 

​​Moreover, teams are continually learning and need the ability to iterate. Product managers keep getting fresh market intel that needs to be injected into the product, data scientists keep making breakthroughs in the predictive algorithm’s accuracy, designers keep refining based on user feedback. The name of the game is agile, iterative, and mass parallelization of teams. 
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But how do leaders run all of these very different teams that depend on each other in parallel, and still deliver to market fast?

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