Product Cafe: The End-user is the king👑

Jan 29, 2022

Hey everyone!

Welcome to this week's edition of Product Cafe. Every week, we curate everything interesting around product management and send it right into your inbox 📩

Product Good read 📖

“In my humble opinion” by Thor Mitchell

I was reading a story to my nephew last week. It was about a peacock and a crane. I don't want to dive deep into the niceties of the story, but the moral of the story is that humility is the most important trait to empower kids with. If you think about it, staying teachable, regardless of how much you already know (i.e., humility), is a skill that anyone should master irrespective of their age and where they are in their life.

Why and how is humility necessary in the lives of product managers?

In this article, Thor Mitchell, a product management coach and former CPO of Crowdcube, explains the importance of humility for product managers.

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Curated lists ✨

1. The Four Steps to Epiphany

Startups are not smaller versions of large companies. Startups search for business models while existing companies execute them. The Four steps to epiphany offer a four-step customer development process and provide insights on what makes a startup successful.

The Four Steps to Epiphany by Steve Blank helps uncover flaws in product and business plans and correct them before they become costly. Packed with concrete examples of what to do, how to do it, and when, this book is an essential read for anyone starting something new.

Read the summary here —> The Four steps to Epiphany

2. Crafting valuable release notes

Clement Cao, a product management coach and instructor, feels that the humble act of writing release notes is overlooked and underutilized.

And that’s why Clement has pulled together a guide for writing valuable release notes.

Read the article here → Crafting valuable release notes

3. Experimentation as a litmus test for your culture

Experimentation can be a game-changer for product innovation. But many companies still struggle to fully embrace it and make it a part of the product development routine.

Culture misfit being the main reason, Experimentation as a litmus test for your culture is all about discussing the 5 key areas where Experimentation can help uncover unhealthy trends in the org and how to fix them.

4. Should you be Product-led?

In this week's listening section, we have an interesting episode by HeadsUp, where Calvin French Owen, the Founder of Segment, discusses

How Segment found go-to-market success in its early days
Why Calvin decided to open up Segment's product and make it self-serve
The 3 main reasons for starting a product-led motion for your product

Listen to the episode here —> Should you be Product-led?

5. Associate Product Manager Fellowship

The 2nd cohort of the Associate Product Manager Fellowship by Nextleap is now open for enrolment. It’s a six-week program where you get to attend live sessions with industry experts and learn everything from basic product skills to building a functional product without any coding.

What else is brewing? ☕

We went live with 1500 users last week. We've been receiving impressive feedback. We’d love for you to join our list of beta users. Sign up here if you are interested.

Top pick from our collection 🔥

Product-Led Growth: The end-user is the king

A decade back, if your product is able to convince the buyer or the decision-maker, that it will solve the business use cases, it's a win-win. The user experience was not really a big deal then. Do you think the same scenario still exists? Definitely not.

Then why usability and end-user experience have started to matter a lot in present-day product development? Kausambi Manjita, the Co-founder and CEO of Mason, feels that this is the significant difference between the conventional sales-led model and the current product-led growth strategy. Not just that, she throws light on a lot of interesting insights from her experience in the modern product-led growth model.

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