Author: Adam Thomas
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Black Epics
Black Epics is a podcast dedicated to sharing the stories of successful Black Product Managers. Ronke Majekodunmi – How to build strong coalitions Tonya Edmonds – How to Successfull Vince Aidoo – The Value of Learning from Failure Ayo Omojola – Fighting Covid and Pushin Rafael Balbi Jr. – Key Learnings in Becoming a Principal…
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If you build it, they will do nothing
Season 4 Finale How to talk to your customers with Brian Casel [#37] Top 10 Avoidable Mistakes SaaS Startups Make with Rob Walling Being expert enough with Nick Loper [#40] Pro-Level SaaS Marketing with Corey Haines [#39] Building with your audience with Brennan Dunn [#38] Every billion-dollar company started with 10 customers. Those first few…
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An alive strategy vs. Dead strategy
Product Strategy is Important One of the most important roles of a product manager (PM) is setting the product strategy. The strategy, by way of a roadmap, is the document that drives team alignment. When a group of people adopts a strategy, it transforms the product strategy from just a piece of paper to something that drives team…
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When It Comes to AI, Don’t Get Trapped in the Magic Box
AI can be a powerful tool, but, ultimately, it’s just that: a tool. Make sure you understand its processes so that you’re the one in control of making product decisions. Computers are not smart. For me, the war against the myth of computer intelligence began in ninth grade when someone in my class started talking…
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Accuracy vs. Precision: what’s the difference?
Accuracy and precision may seem like the same thing, but understanding the distinction between them will let you level up your product management skills. Would you prefer your work to be accurate or precise? This sounds like a trick question, right? Aren’t they the same thing? Well, not exactly. Both are important to your product management practice.…
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What are customer needs? 5 steps to meet them
There are three certainties in life: Death, taxes, and product marketers being reminded to address their customer needs. Sure, you can be easily forgiven if you’re sick of hearing this time and time again. After all, it’s a message seemingly being played on a continuous loop, and it ain’t gonna lose its momentum anytime soon.…
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Why you should build customer trust as a product marketing leader
Ensuring your organization builds customer trust is one of the most important things you can do as a product marketing leader. You want to have a long-standing relationship with your customers to increase their loyalty to your organization, improve overall brand reputation, and ultimately bring in those much-needed sales so you can meet your company-wide…
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What is a case study in marketing?
What is a case study in marketing? A case study is a testimonial outlining your customers’ success with using your product, explaining how your product’s key features led to benefits for your customer such as productivity and through increases and time and cost savings. Case studies often serve as your products’ calling card, highlighting how…
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Bias in interviews and why hiring in product is broken
Hiring in product is broken, and those hypothetical product questions you get asked in interviews are just the tip of the iceberg. “Describe a coffee cup.” No, you’re not in the middle of a therapy session, you’re in a product manager interview, and a bad one at that. If you can, you should get up…
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What Do Product Managers Produce?
Product management, unlike many other technical disciplines, doesn’t create a discrete output. So, what should you be spending your time on? Product managers (PdM) are responsible for helping companies make better decisions consistently over time. In a previous article, I talked about how wide-ranging the job can be. Product managers do a lot, but the…
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To stay agile, don’t let your product team get trapped in a loop
To ensure your product team is truly following the Agile Manifesto, you have to give yourselves time to adjust. That can’t happen when you’re stuck in a positive feedback loop. Product managers (PdM) oversee more than features. Simply focusing on them is a mistake and will leave the product person in charge of nothing more…
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What does a product manager actually do?
Product management requires flexibility and adaptability in its practitioners. So, with so much nuance, how do we define what product managers actually do? Product management (PdM) is a flexible discipline. It means different things to different people for a few reasons. I could continue a list like this for quite some time. The theme would…
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What is product discovery?
Product discovery is a process typically undertaken by product teams, UI/UX researchers, UX designers, UI designers and company stakeholders. The process is performed to define a problem, explore potential solutions and build a working prototype that will present value to customers. Modern product discovery and validation is essential to startup success, for example, those utilizing the outcome-driven innovation framework see an…
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How to conduct better product management interviews
Hiring is one of the most important parts of product leadership. Use these principles to make sure you’re landing the best talent. Product leadership is difficult. That difficulty comes because it’s often very different from product management. As a product manager (PdM), your focus is squarely on making sure that your team is consistently making…
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As product manager, what story should you tell?
As product manager, how do you take your plans from theory to action? Simple: Tell the right story. Making change is hard. Even harder is making change while projects are in motion. As a product manager, though, this is the job. Remember, as a PdM, you are judged on how you improve the decision fitness…
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Driving organisational alignment with survival metrics (with Adam Thomas, product coach)
Listen here! About the Episode An interview with Adam Thomas. Adam is a passionate product leader & product coach who wants to help you drive organisational alignment. By day he’s Lead Product Manager for a recruiting platform, and by night he’s the hero that Gotham needs with product consultancy Approaching One. We speak about a lot, including:…
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What do you do when product and customer success won’t play nice?
Too often, customer success and product teams treat each other like adversaries. Here’s how to fix that. What kind of relationship do you have with your company’s customer success team? I often ask product teams this question, and the answer is usually that there isn’t a relationship at all. And if there is, it’s hanging…
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Build better products by creating better case studies
Case studies are one of the most useful items in the product management toolkit. To build effective ones, you need to follow a simple but vital set of guidelines. Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, first released in 1984, popularized the concept of social proof. This phenomenon consists of individuals copying the actions of…
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How to improve your product research
Your research involves talking to customers to gain insight. Great — now let’s talk about how to make it matter. In the world of technology, where the products we work on have to deal with the tensions of a rapidly changing marketplace, conducting customer research is critical to keep pace. Doing it often and well…
