Finest-5 Product reads #20
Product Led Growth, Minimum viable product manager, and other reads..
Hi! Happy Sunday,
We all know there is a hype about Product-led growth. As digital products become easy to build, the market is exploding, leading to a higher competition for niche and superior products. With so many things controlled by product and increased cost of acquiring customers, we are getting a decade of Product-led growth.
Why Product Led Growth Is Having It’s Moment Now
Product led growth is one of the most talked about words when we hear how companies need to scale. The era of sales and marketing being the center stage for growth, is now moving towards how your product can sell itself. Continue reading..
Key Takeaways:
- The best products who deliver best value at most optimum price point are starting to emerging and are winning in their respective niches
- Software development costs have gone down drastically in the last decade or so.
- Intra-org power dynamics are gravitating towards the product managers.
How to Show Validation When You Have None
Well, the repeated discussions I have had over time are what we need to show validation. Do we need to build Product MVPs that take months before saying this thing will not work? Or do we figure out answers early on? Continue reading..
Key Takeaways:
- Be creative with Validation, a complete product is not the only validation
- We can showcase a validation through prototype and by getting pre-registration
- User purchasing intent without complete product can be a validation point
A/B Testing Alternatives for Low-Traffic Websites
PMs wish to A/B test almost everything, but truth is harsh and only few things, if possible, can be tested this way. Hence, we should always learn to have faster and lower cost alternatives that can help to provide usability understanding without A/B. Continue reading..
Key Takeaways:
- Over 70% of online businesses do not follow data-driven decisions for website changes.
- If you ask your users to look first at the Control and then at the Variation, their opinion about the latter will be biased, so it’s important to split your participants.
- What you should avoid in your user screening process:
- Asking yes/no kind of questions such as, “Do you need a CRM solution?”
- Offering very similar responses for multiple-choice questions.
Minimum Viable Product Manager
If you are a Product Manager, you know the never ending challenges you must have faced in your initial years. Well, somewhere it was due to lower experience or lesser grip on a skill. But in the end, leaders should manage this so you or others grow better into a product person. Continue reading..
Key Takeaways:
- For first time product managers, a large problem is being in a position of leadership by influence, without having the experience to back it up.
- Minimum Viable Product Manager needs to cut across all the layers
- A career in product management is then a ladder of increasing zoom levels, increasing uncertainty
Designing Empty States in Complex Applications: 3 Guidelines
There is no way you and I can avoid default screens. Where there is an error or empty screens, I see an opportunity for another related task or to pass some important message. We should always use these spaces, so we can derive value from nothing. Continue reading..
Key Takeaways:
- Do not default to totally empty states. This creates confusion for users, who may be left wondering if the system is still loading information or if errors have occurred.
- Provide direct pathways (i.e., links) to getting started with related key tasks.
- If there is no relevant data to display, use the empty space to provide a system-status message
Product of the week: UsabilityHub
Remote user research platform
If you want to get some quick insights on your product or there are changes you want to do on your web page, UsabilityHub can be a good tool to get insights. Reviews of the tool are great and so are features it provides. You can so easily track so many things from user flow to 5 second tests.
