Zac Best

As an ambitious product person, probably the best thing that can happen to you is to report to a Craftsperson manager who has a high bar and can give specific, clear, not-hand wavy feedback on how your proposals and thinking can be more correct, although unfortunately if given a choice, >50% of ambitious product people don’t choose to report to such a manager.

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Two companies with combined £3.8bn revenue are ending bureaucracy for product teams. Here’s how: Anyone who's worked in product teams in the corporate world will at some point have:   - Wondered whether senior management have any idea what your team does, or indeed cares - Doubted if what you are doing is fully aligned with the company strategy - Been frustrated by complex top-down bureaucratic planning and prioritisation     In the last few years, I have seen 2 companies simplify planning by closing the gap between senior management and product teams.   Not only did this make teams more effective, but it provided a huge motivational boost that ultimately made them more productive too.   Here's how they did it:   𝟏) 𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐁𝐚𝐧𝐤   Monzo Bank eliminated the middle layers of bureaucracy between product teams and management.   Every quarter, the executive committee would talk directly to the product teams and set the top 4 quarterly priorities.   For example:   - Improving customer experience for service W - Improving X part of platform - Expansion to country Y - Cost reduction for area Z   Product teams focused solely on these 4 priorities for the next quarter.   And that was it.   I remember someone from Monza saying “if a team wasn’t focused on at least one of those priorities they would look pretty stupid, and because it was so simple, it worked”.   𝟐) 𝐈𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐫   My favourite example is a UK Investment Manager, partly because it had the challenge of a 10k employee hierarchical organisation embedded with very traditional ways of working.   They introduced a new quarterly planning process – a single day bringing all product teams physically or virtually together.   First, each product team would:   - List their top 3 achievements from the past quarter - List their top 3 priorities for the next quarter   Then the genius part. The CEO, CFO and CTO would physically (or virtually) walk from team to team. It was the first time most people had seen the CEO in real life, let alone have the chance to talk with them.   The exec team would:   - Review each team's past quarter achievements - Assess next quarter's priorities - Ask questions, re-order if needed, then confirm alignment with company strategy   I watched one of these in practice. It sounds simple but do not underestimate the motivational power of receiving recognition and ratification, right from the top.   From what I have seen it is the minority of mid to large size organisations where something like this is actually happening (if you’ve seen it then I’d be interested to know)   —   Closing the gap between senior management and teams can have a huge impact on their motivation and ultimately productivity.

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Seeing this says to me the Ruroc EOX launch has flopped. If you're asking customers "why didn't you buy" with options of: "Product Design isn't good enough" "I am waiting for a good promotion" ...You have to be deluded if you think you're going to get actionable information from a survey like this. Here's what has gone wrong for Ruroc. Firstly, "EOX" was designed as the 'Finale' of the Atlas line. It should have been positioned as the pinnacle of the range and should have replaced the Atlas 4. Atlas was plagued with issues from v1.0. We rushed, the pandemic hit, suppliers messed us around, we had to build our own factory REMOTELY to keep up with demand. To fix the issue once and for all I hired a specialist product designer who built out the team to deliver the 'perfect product'. It was costly, but it would allow us to reduce our Customer Service costs, return logistics costs, and reduce our in-house QC team from 18 to just 2-3. A huge cost to get a huge saving. Absolutely necessary for Ruroc to stabilise and continue growing at 70-100% YOY. That product, the one that should have been Ruroc's biggest success, is now called "EOX". To sell products online and grow successfully you need: - Scarcity - "I want stuff other people don't have yet, or I don't want to regret not buying when I had the chance." - Innovation - People want the latest greatest and best... if it's not that, why am I giving you my money if my current product does the job? - Social Proof - it's FOMO, who's wearing it, who's buying it, am I going to be the odd one out if I don't buy? - Reciprocity - What's this brand done for me? How have they engaged me? Do I buy into their mission, do I feel obliged to be part of it. - Commitment - OK I've pre-registered, I've followed the page, I've signed up for the newsletter, I'm watching the launch video, I'm going to buy. Not one of these tactics was properly employed during the launch of the "EOX" Further to that, some genius has made the decision to continue with the Atlas 4 and have it run alongside the EOX So now, as a customer of Ruroc, what does this say to me. Ruroc Atlas 4.0 Track - $679.00 (Has no real track certificate) Ruroc Atlas 4.0 Carbon - $595.00 Ruroc "EOX" - $559.00 (brand new should be better than Atlas 4) Ruroc Atlas 4.0 Street (fibreglass) - $319.00 (Confusingly is lighter than the Track and Carbon Atlas) So if I want the best, I buy the most expensive helmet? I can wear it on the Track right? No, not in USA or MotoGP. I want the lightest, so I buy the cheapest? I want the newest, but is it worse than the old models because it's cheaper? This is beyond confusing for customers. Customers give brands minimal attention. Your messaging is as much in the decisions you make around naming and pricing as it is anything else. Ruroc "Atlas-X" - $659.00 Drop the Atlas 4.0 and discount til it's gone Clear message to consumers - "the new product is better, replace your old helmet now" It's not hard.

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Last night at ProductTank London we heard from 4 different speakers on the topic of Product Culture. My key takeaway is this... 'Good' product culture lacks definition. You might read about the importance of product culture, or ask about it when interviewing. You may even try to evaluate how good or bad the product culture is at your company. But here's the bottom line: product culture 𝘪𝘴𝘯'𝘵 something that you'll usually find written down, like you would a strategy, a roadmap, or a vision. Hearing someone describe it will inherently be biased. Product culture is the shared values, beliefs, behaviours, and practices that shape a team, org, or company's identity. It changes when you change your beliefs, behaviours, and practices. Not satisfied with the product culture at your company? You're more empowered to change it than you might think. How have you gone about improving product culture at your company?

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Following on from yesterdays post for those starting a new product manager role. Here is our guide to making your startup’s first product hire. Which includes: 👉 When to make your first product hire 👉 To free, or not to free(lance) 👉 Hiring in-house 👉 Hiring a contractor 👉 Important principles for your first product hire 👉 What skill set should your first product hire have? 👉 Setting your team up for success 👉 It’s time to hire

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🚀 Thank you to Aakash Gupta and Jason Knight for putting together this insightful guide! If you want to learn more about it, check this article where Alexander Bahlk, our Fractional Director of Product, was interviewed: https://lnkd.in/d_9JcmQw

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The fractional CPO role is the hottest new role in product. Here's what you need to know: 1. Fractional v Interim v Consulting It's easy to confuse the variety of non-traditional product leadership jobs these days. You can think of a simple 2x2 to distinguish them. You ask 2 questions: • Do you lead product? • Are you full-time? This breaks down the four types: Lead product & full-time: Interim CPO Lead product & part time: Fractional CPO Don't lead product & full-time: Regular PM Don't lead product & part-time: Product Consultant or Coach There is a nuance in 'lead' here. There are some fractional roles where the team doesn't report to you. (Though one of the fractionals we talked to call that "having one arm tied behind your back.") 2. History of the Role Fractional roles like accounting are as old as commerce. But, in product, they are much newer. It started in the 90s, with the rise of an adjacent role: the interim product role. The interim product role grew steadily. More and more companies and startups found it worked to solve their problems. Then, with the rise of the fractional CTO role, companies started to accept or even look for more fractional leaders in R&D. In the last 5 years, the role really took off. In pandemic-era ZIRP, it even went a bit berserk. With roles becoming remote and workers exercising more control than ever, both supply and demand boomed. Now, in the post-ZIRP era, fractional's pullback hasn't been as steep as full-time PM. Because those companies with tighter budgets are even more likely to see the value in a fractional leadership role. As a result, the fractional CPO role as a whole has continued its up-trend. 3. Who Hires Fractional CPOs? There's a million scenarios where you might want a senior professional, paid by the day, who has done the job before. But, from our conversations with 20 fractional product leaders, there are 4 "sweet spot" scenarios that fractional CPOs fit in really well: Scenario 1 - Startup Startups have been the original consumer of interim roles, and they continue to power fractional roles. They often have the tight budgets that require it. Scenario 2 - Scale-Up After a fundraise, companies often want to invest in new areas, and a fractional leader can come in quickly to help with that. Scenario 3 - Turnaround When things aren't going right, and product isn't pulling its weight, a turnaround is often in order. Fractional CPOs are often called in these situations. Scenario 4 - Bridge When somebody unexpectedly leaves, or goes on parental leave, is often when companies want to turn to someone senior they can hire on a time-limited basis. 4. Fractional CPO vs Fractional PM Fractional CPOs lead product. They're working on product vision and strategy. They're not reporting to another CPO. That's a fractional PM role. If they're full-time, they're Interim CPOs.

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When you’re a millennial product manager, attempting to share her knowledge of product, with the wider community and one of the most successful artists in the world is currently on a mass tour of the UK, there’s only one question on your mind: What would the dangerous animals of product management be if they were Taylor Swift songs? If you've been asking yourself the same question then have I got a blog post for you! https://lnkd.in/dYxE_QDq #product #productmanagement #tech #UX

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PM Stereotype #3: The Strategist This is the missing half of the Product-Owner —a mid-level PM solely responsible for thinking of the “big picture”, looking at the users, business and market, talking to managers and stakeholders and devising the perfect roadmap. However no PM, senior has she may be, can do a good job without having tactical understanding of the software and the team. Handing off features to someone else to figure out the “small details” has never worked. Product development requires many iterations and changes. Splitting the decisions across two people makes everything slower and less effective.

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What Makes a Good Product Market Fit Metric? PMF = “time to start building scalable acquisition channels” There are many definitions of product market fit: → Product market fit is your NPS score → Product market fit is when 40% of your users would be “very disappointed” if they no longer have access to your product → Product market fit is a feeling → You need a good distribution channel to have product market fit → … and the list goes on But while choosing the metrics for their startups, founders often miss asking an important question: 'What makes a good product-market fit metric? I always suggest that... Prior to product market fit, you should be focused on making the product better for your existing users. When a product has “product market fit”, it means that the product is good enough to start shifting focus from improving the product to growing distribution channels. If you distribute a product that isn’t great, even if you are able to get a lot of initial users, a few months down the road your user base won’t grow significantly or may even decline. So, you can also think of product market fit as “time to start building scalable acquisition channels”. A good product market fit metric will have a low rate of false positives and false negatives. It won’t tell you that you should start distributing when your product isn’t good enough, and it won’t tell you that you shouldn’t start distributing when it is good enough. The risk with false positives is that you work on distribution when you should be working on making the product better, which results in wasted distribution efforts due to churned users. The risk of false negatives is that you don’t work on distribution early enough to compete with competitors or meet goals needed to raise your next round before you run out of runway. To summarize, a good product market fit metric: → Will tell you when the product is good enough to work acquisition channels → Minimizes false positives - won’t tell you to work on acquisition channels when the product needs more improvement → Minimizes false negatives - will tell you to on acquisition channels as soon as the product is good enough, to maximize growth You can use these points to evaluate the other definition of product market fit. 1️⃣ NPS and Growth Net Promoter Score (NPS) is often used to gauge product-market fit, but it has limitations. While some of the world’s biggest tech companies have poor NPS, they still manage to grow to millions or even billions of users. This highlights a major issue with using NPS as a product-market fit metric: it can lead to both false positives and false negatives. Just because a product has a low NPS doesn’t mean it can’t achieve massive growth, and vice versa. We have shared a detailed writeup on same topic, in our venture curator newsletter. Check out here: https://lnkd.in/dJgcdwqR . #startups #venturecapital #funding #founders #startuptips #fund #angelinvestors #vc

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 Some great thoughts here by Apoorva Mishra. Particularly the point on frameworks being “supplements, not substitutes"... Worth a quick look for anyone in product development!

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The biggest complaint I hear from product leaders? Their teams aren’t adding the impact they need 💥 Here are 3 simple steps to turn it around. 1. Are they focussed on the right problems? 🔥 Are the product teams working on initiatives that contribute to your strategy? 🔥 Are they targeting the key metrics that you really need to drive? E.g. MRR, conversion. If not, question whether you should pivot their focus to something else. 2. Do they actually understand the direction? 🤷🏽‍♀️ Often we think that people know what they should be doing, but they missed the memo. You need to overcommunicate. Make the direction clear. Make the why clear. & then tell talk through it again. 3. Are they set up to be effective? 🔥 Product teams lose productivity with: • BS processes (eg. 20 million meetings) • Siloes (eg. no cross-team alignment) • Too many priorities (so nothing is ever completed) Want to solve this? Align the right people around the right problems with TRULY cross-functional teams. Include all of the right people (think sales, CS, marketing) & truly align them to strategic goals to succeed. If you follow these 3 steps - you’re teams are guaranteed to add the impact you need to see 💥 Hi, I’m Evie. I coach Product Leaders to be sh*t hot at Product 🔥 I’ve worked with clients to 3x their job satisfaction, 2x their confidence & deliver more impact. Want the same? Just drop me a DM 📧

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Aakash Gupta perfectly described the essence of the Fractional CPO role. Take a look if you, like me, provide product management services or consume such services as a startup, scaleup, or even an enterprise. The extensive report by Aakash, which he provided in the comments, is also worth reading. #CPO #startups #consulting

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The are just a few spots left for me 2h masterclass Essential Coaching Skills for Product Leaders, which I'll be offering to both US and UK/EU time zones. Pick the option that suits you and we'll go from there. My masterclass will aim to answer these three core questions: - What do we mean by “coaching”? - How can a coaching approach change your leadership style? - What is it about asking open-ended questions that make all the difference? The course is a mix of theory and practice, giving everyone an opportunity to put your learnings into practice. If you have any other questions, just drop me a DM and I'll be happy to have a chat.

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In the past, it was hard for a product designer to find a good team in the UK (or Europe). Even harder if you're a woman. Meta hired me 9 years ago to build their first design teams outside the US. What I found moving from the US to the UK was that, although there were many great UX/UI designers, few UK companies had mature design disciplines. Designers rarely had the chance to exercise their product thinking muscles. Many had the potential, but lacked the opportunity. Even fewer were women, non-binary, or from a marginalised background. That has changed with Meta's design team in London growing in leaps + bounds, and other companies like Google, Apple, Airbnb, ustwo + frog building tech teams in the UK + Europe. These are places where designers' voices are amplified, and they are empowered to solve complex problems. Great startups like Deliveroo, Bumble Inc., FARFETCH, Klarna + Monzo Bank have also emerged and their design practices matured. But many designers are left in the gap. They may have developed solid product thinking, interaction design + visual design skills, but are often still looking for a place where they can spread their proverbial design wings and own entire products. If you're that person, or know a designer like that, a great next career step can be a startup, especially one with product managers, engineers, or designers as the founding team. They may be more inclined to invest in talent who are earlier in their career if they're good at rapidly ideating + prototyping. But we still have the challenge that only 24% of designers in Europe are women or non-binary folx. We know that women with a female ally in their workplace are more likely to be happier, grow faster, and land higher-level positions with greater authority and higher pay. When I saw London startup Sidekick were hiring their 2nd designer to report to Kelly Hutchinson, I knew this was a special door opening. There aren't many startups with women design leaders as part of the original team. Kelly and I hired together at Meta. She was passionate then about opening doors for women and people from underrepresented backgrounds, as she is now. She's an exceptional designer, and good people. So if you know of any senior designers in London frustrated with evangelising the value of design, who want to create something innovative and new, and learn alongside a world-class, ex-Meta female designer, check out the link in my comments and apply. And if not, that's cool too. I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments about other companies that are pushing the boundaries of design in the UK + Europe, and being led by gender-diverse teams. ``````````````` 👋🏼 Follow me for career tips + follow Good Maven for design jobs #ProductDesign #UXDesign #UXJobs #VisualDesign #UX #UI #UserExperience #DesignJobs #Hiring #Design #DesignSystems #BlackInTech #LatinxInTech UX Jobs Ladies That UX Ladies that UX London Tech Ladies®

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Compounding velocity x ambition in product teams Success in building product teams within traditional organizations hinges significantly on aligning incentives and building a proof-of-work that includes big bets. While many orgs write & philosophise product-thinking or product-led growth, the daily actions or order of operations don’t reflect that thinking. Customer impact is not the north-star, rather is relegated to one of the many items as filter for decisions. In the long run, this leads to delusion amongst new members or confusion amongst existing members. Backlogs reduce to being a a treadmill without aligning to a key north-star and frequent questions asked being “when will a feature be delivered” / “who will work on the feature” rather than being centered on “why a certain feature is to be built” / “What will lead to success”. A key reason or factor that contributes to this mismatch in daily actions vs. espoused values is not aligning team incentives to customer impact. Such an alignment acts as a major positive catalyst to building a product-centric culture and practise an actual product-operating model. Another key area to improve a product team’s customer impact is around laddering up the focus to pursue big bets vs. executing only on incremental i.e. safe bets. Building a repeatable high-velocity execution model can be a good first step to incorporate customer-centric & market-driven feedback into the roadmap. Done right, this approach can help build institutional learning faster. Over time, when we need to infuse big bets in a quarterly & subsequently monthly frequency, both discovery and delivery muscle (built in the earlier phase) increase odds of success. #product #bets #org #culture

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I wanted to give a shout-out to David Pereira for his first book Untrapping Product Teams (I was a beta reader). The book is grounded in reality, and full of actionable insights that are based on David own experience. David covers a lot of ground in a concise and compelling manner, using his typical no-nonsense style and real-world examples. If you're a product person, I'm sure you'll find much value in the many insights, frameworks, and tools the book provides. https://a.co/d/01Sn4LFH

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🚀 Are you a product entrepreneur looking to nail your product briefing? Tune into my latest episode where I break down creating extensive and detailed product briefs. From market needs to technical requirements—I've got you covered! Click the link below or head over to my podcast 'From Product Idea to a Thriving Business'. #ProductManagement #Entrepreneurship https://lnkd.in/e5cf2834

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🚀 Are you a product entrepreneur looking to nail your product briefing? Tune into my latest episode where I break down creating extensive and detailed product briefs. From market needs to technical requirements—I've got you covered! Click the link below or head over to my podcast 'From Product Idea to a Thriving Business'. #ProductManagement #Entrepreneurship https://lnkd.in/e5cf2834

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