Finest-5 Product reads #45

Intercom, product discovery, roadmap, etc.

Harsh Jain
3 min readOct 23, 2022

Hi,

There have been many articles around what it takes to be a good product manager. However, here is a little different take on things and I came across this blog on 10 things that scare Product Managers. An interesting and very relatable read.

Every week, I summarise the best reads from 100+ articles with the sole purpose of helping you become better at product with minimal effort. Subscribe!!

Problem Discovery Leads to Product Discovery

Product discovery has become very popular in Product Circles. People talk about it almost everywhere now. What’s important is to realise the difference in problem and product discovery.

Key Takeaways:

  • Product management lives in the Problem space — who has the problem, what is the problem, and why would they want to solve that problem.
  • A product manager who hasn’t had a 1-on-1 customer conversation this week — without a sales objective — isn’t qualified to be a product manager.
  • The last step of Problem Discovery is to validate your findings.

Product Roadmap: Definition, Types, and Examples

Though I try to avoid product roadmap articles as they have become omnipresent. However, this one does an excellent summary of roadmaps in general.

Key Takeaways:

  • You should keep your roadmap short and simple to avoid too many changes, which can be entered in the specific backlogs.
  • Roadmap types: Strategy Roadmap, Market Roadmap, Visionary Roadmap, Technology Roadmap, External Roadmap, Internal Roadmap.
  • Roadmap examples: Release Plan, Sprint Plan, Now-next-later roadmap, Kanban roadmap

Case study: How Intercom Grows

Intercom has been growing and growing good. One of the things I know they have been doing well is content. I love their content. But that isn’t enough. There is more to their strategy.

Key Takeaways:

  • Use the JTBD framework to not only build better products, but to market to people based on fundamental, shared jobs they are hiring your product to achieve.
  • Determine your value metric — and priced dynamically
  • Use popular content from relevant communities to drive ideas

AI UX Design: A New Way Of Designing

The future of AI isn’t dependent on a select few AI-powered projects. Instead, this technology will become a supporting layer for all apps. And directly and indirectly it builds a lot around UX.

Key Takeaways:

  • AI UX design enables highly personalised user experiences. This enhances the value of your product to a wider audience of users.
  • UX design involves a plethora of repetitive tasks. AI-infused design automates many of these tasks, speeding up projects and freeing time for more innovative, big-picture tasks.
  • Trust is an integral factor in designing AI products. This trust can be built through proper user education, clear communication, flexibility, and integrity.

Copywriting Mistakes That are Hurting Your Product Experience and Conversion

Copywriting is still a debated task. I have in the past passed it over to marketing and design, but soon realized that the justice was not delivered. Now, I do it myself.

Key Takeaways:

  • Write it and then rewrite it. Re-write 10–20 versions of the headline.
  • No one cares what you can do. Everyone cares what you can do for them.
  • Conflict creates interest. Create tension in the headline if possible.

--

--