The Mom Test by is one of the best books I have read about customer interviews.

If you are a Product Manager or a UX designer or researcher, and you haven’t read it…..please just go and read it.

I just hope some of the nuggets I share here (with my own commentary) help convince you. Seriously its a short read, costs 10 bucks on Kindle and just so worth it.

Here are my main learnings from the book

1. Go into customer interviews with the right mindset
2. Talk about their life instead of your idea
3. Ask terrifying questions
4. Don’t assume that the problem space matters to them
5. Get commitment. Ignore compliments
6. Refine your customer segment until you get consistent problems and goals
7. Get clever on finding conversations

Go into customer interviews with the right mindset

“Deciding what to build is your job.……You aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed...

Summary

What’s your energy level as a product manager? 

When you go day to day, come into work, are you in to it?  Are you excited? Do you bring this high energy level or the appropriate energy level to your team, to the work that you do?  Are you intense in every activity that you do? 

Those things matter a lot, they can literally change how much you get done in a day, how excited your team feels. 

Let’s look at six different kinds of energy levels that you must demonstrate in order to make sure you're living up to your potential as a product manager. 

The first energy level is you need to be positive, energetic, give them a sense of an epic win possible and that the product will do well.  Align the team behind achieving the best possible thing for your product, for your customers.   

Second you need to vary your communication level.  You as a product manager must work on not just being at a high...

I attended Boston Product's breakfast on the topic of user research.  Here are my core takeaways from the event:

Opportunities to do research exist everywhere!

Opportunities for user research exist everywhere. Ideas came up included

• Listening to support calls
• Putting up surveys in the product and validating hypothesis quantitatively
• Using LinkedIn and Facebook to recruit friends or friends of friends for user studies
• Actually viewing user sessions with plugins such as Full Story and Appsee
• Sales calls. Several Product Managers mentioned that they went to sales calls in exchange for being able to interview customers
• Attending industry conferences
• Malls, Liquor stores etc. Basically anywhere where your potential customers might hang out

Justifying user research can be tricky

Fighting for resources for User Research still seemed like an uphill battle for several product managers. One of the participants had to re-organize their role and make sure that they...

Summary

Most people drive change through pure willpower. In the process they do more harm than good. Rather than doing that, let’s focus on how you might design change into your life.

I use the word “design” consciously. Willpower and repetition is one way to improve a skill, to building a habit. But there are so many ways where you can transform your life with less effort, with more happiness, and a much bigger impact to you, and everyone around you!

There are three things I cover hear:

• The eight major ways to drive change in your life
• The four foundational habits you need to have in order to drive these changes
• The two support systems you need to put into place to help drive these changes

Eight ways to drive change in your life

Know your why. Knowing your why is not this magical thing that we only get by meditating for 7 days and then journaling for another 13. Knowing your why comes down to two things:

1. Recognize work you...

Momentum is easy to see in sports. One team is doing better, seems to have more energy, pulls off crucial moments with ease, and has a stronger body language. While the other team - they seem to have their backs to the wall. They seem to start to lose grip on their position in the game. They might be ahead but seems not so for long.

The same thing applies to Product Management. Momentum is crucial but can take many forms. There are five aspects to Product Management momentum; the market, your product, your stakeholders, your team, and you.

Market momentum

How well is the category of products you're working on doing? So, as an example, if I was to start a company today, let's say that's a competitor to Uber or Lyft, there's a good chance that I'm hardly able to get any market share. But because this category is doing well, I will at least get some momentum in the marketplace because as we've heard, a rising tide lifts all boats.

It's always important to consider...

Marty Cagan: Product is Hard

A huge thanks to Josie-Dee Seagren for taking crazy good notes and co-authoring this post with me.

On May 13, 2019, I attended a talk by Marty Cagan called Product is Hard. I have read his blog posts and his book ‘INSPIRED’, and it was such a treat listening to this talk and meeting him in person.

Here were Josie-Dee’s and my notes and main takeaways from the talk.

Why product is hard

1. Frustration with lean & agile
2. Validating ideas vs. discovering solutions
3. Planning vs. prototyping
4. Not thinking broadly enough about risks
5. Not thinking about ethical risks
6. Playing defense vs. offense
7. Confusing optimization with discovery
8. Qualitative vs. quantitative
9. Not considering alternative solutions or approaches
10. Product manager competence
11. Coaching product managers
12. Truly empowered teams

1. Frustration with lean & agile

Lean and Agile are not wrong. They have very simple core principles, which are almost indisputably good.

So the problem is not...

As product managers we have a LOT on our plates. Product strategy, vision, facilitating meetings, bug triages, writing user stories, answering questions from the sales team, design reviews, customer meetings, usability studies, stakeholder alignments, bringing the donuts and what not.

What happens as a result of this? We tend to do what is easy to do in the moment, rather than what really matters. And why blame us? We are human. This is human tendency. It is much easier to attend some meeting than to start to think about the roadmap for next year. I go somewhere, I get something concrete achieved. There, done.

But consider this: The Pareto principle states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Nowhere is this more true than work you can do as a product manager.

Most of this high value work is concentrated in a few areas: thinking about product vision and strategy, piecing together various forms of input to figure...