/Product

Product Management Is Broken. Engineers Can Fix It.

- James Hawkins tl;dr: “When Tim and I first started PostHog in 2020, I was adamant we would never hire a product manager. I wanted engineers to wrestle with hard product problems. Product managers, I believed, would just get in the way. Four years on, I admit I was (partially) wrong. We need product managers. But I was right about one thing: there is a better way. Over the past two years, we've redefined how PMs and engineers work together, and optimized everything we do for speed and autonomy. Here's our exact playbook.”

featured in #573

Measuring Product Impact Without A/B Testing: How Discord Used the Synthetic Control Method for Voice Messages

- Alec Brevé Angela Ambroz tl;dr: “Sometimes, you just can’t randomize - it’s either not possible, or it’s unethical, or you sacrifice too much precision. In those cases, you can release your treatment to one group and create a composite, synthetic control made up of a weighted combination of your untreated groups.”

featured in #570

Leading vs Lagging Indicators

- Rasmus Makwarth tl;dr: “Focusing on outcomes over outputs is a great framework to ensure that product teams think about delivering value, not just features. If you can’t tie a business outcome to a feature, you may want to reconsider its priority.” Rasmus discusses six leading indicators product teams should be tracking besides technical indicators. 

featured in #558

A/B Testing Mistakes I Learned The Hard Way

- Lior Neu-ner tl;dr: “Running experiments is equal parts powerful and terrifying. Powerful because you can validate changes that will transform your product for the better; terrifying because there are so many ways to mess them up. I’ve run hundreds of A/B tests, both in my previous life as a growth engineer at Meta, and on my personal side project. These are some classic mistakes I’ve learned the hard way and how to avoid them.”

featured in #545

Where More Effective Product Teams Spend More (and Less) Time

- John Cutler tl;dr: “When trying to understand where a team or company is at, one of the first things I do is talk to people about how they spend their time and energy. Words like empowered, feature factory, and outcome-oriented are squishy and can mean a million things. Behaviors don't lie. There are only so many hours in a week, and we have finite energy to do thoughtful work.” John shares where teams that are further along their product journey spend time. 

featured in #534

How We Use Friction Logs To Improve Products At Stripe

- Mike Bifulco tl;dr: “Friction logging is a practice that can be used by engineering teams building products to track and improve upon issues that users experience while using a product. The goal of friction logging is to make a given product better for everyone involved. End users and developers get a product that delivers value more directly, the team building the product gets a more attached, happier user base, and salespeople have an easier time showing value to potential customers.”

featured in #531

An Engineer’s Guide To Talking To Users

- Ian Vanagas tl;dr: (1) How to prepare for a user interview. (2) How to find the right users to talk to. (3) What to ask during user interviews. (4) Mistakes to avoid. (5) What to do after an interview. 

featured in #511

How Figma Builds Product

- Lenny Rachitsky tl;dr: Yuhki, CPO at Figma, discusses the companies product development process. "I asked teams to instead define headlines—essentially, claims that they’d like to make by the end of some time period. For example, it might be something like “Figma is the most efficient way to design,” and the team offers both quantitative and qualitative ways to evaluate that claim."

featured in #369

When Users Never Use The Features They Asked For

- Austin Henley tl;dr: Austin concludes his story with what he learnt as a product minded engineer, including: (1) Always keep your users in the loop. Do not go build in isolation. (2) Don't underestimate engineering challenges that you have an external view of. (3) Voice your concerns to your team regularly and often. They might be to solve them far more quickly or identify a future roadblock. And more.

featured in #256

What is an A/B Test?

tl;dr: How A/B test are run at Netlfix: the importance is on "building intuition." The posts covers the basics of an A/B test, "why it’s important to run an A/B test versus rolling out a feature and looking at metrics pre- and post- making a change, and how we turn an idea into a testable hypothesis."

featured in #254