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Today we talk with Ben Foster the Chief Product Officer at GoCanvas and former product manager at Ebay. Ben is a wealth of Product knowledge and experience and today we discuss the topic of A/B testing and how he's evolved his focus to be vision driven so that he doesn't miss the big opportunities to solve customer problems. This was a hard learned lesson and we hear about his experience A/B testing features with moderate success and what caused him to shift if focus. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. Logi Analytics, which is offering 5 free reports – from analysts like Gartner and Dresne

Today we explore the history of the Product Manager from it's early ideation by Neil McElroy to it's growth at Hewlett-Packard thru it's maturation at Microsoft and into today. We talk with former Microsoft Project Manager, Ellen Chisa, Former Microsoft Engineer (and 55th hire), Mark Zbikowski and Matt LeMay, the Author of Product Management in Practice, about this evolution over the past 80 years.  For Neil McElroy the Brand Men were essentially his manifesto on what would become a product manager today. Their responsibilities ranged from tracking sales to managing the product, advertising and promotions. They were to “take full responsibility” for the brands implementation of advertising and sales and take a ‘huge weight’ off of the sales managers who were both ideating and implementing growth strategies. Bill Hewlett and David Packard interpreted the Brand Man ethos as putting decision making as close as possible to the customer, and making the product manager the voice of the customer internally. In the b

We all think we know everything there is to know about our customers, but data shows that we often know a surprising little amount about who our customers really are. We tend to get complacent and continue building for the personas that we think use our product, but is there a better way? We talk with Laura Klein, author of UX for Lean Startups and Build Better Products, about methods for better user research practices we can all start doing today. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Logi Analytics, which is offering 5 free reports – from analysts like Gartn

Love isn’t rational. It doesn’t always make sense. But when love is in the air, nothing can come between you and a public tweet. Today we talk to people who’ve professed their love, publicly, for products they love. We discuss why they love the products they love, and what about these companies and brands gets them so excited. We dove into tech brands like Slack and Intercom as well as roll-on deodorant brand Phresh and personal fashion brand Stitch Fix. Huge thanks to our guests today: Lindsey Smith: https://twitter.com/LindseySmithHHC, Jordi Romero: https://twitter.com/jordiromero, Natalie Gerke: https://twitter.com/Ngerke, & Alys Gagnon: https://twitter.com/AlysJ BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Phrase. Do you have a product

What would it look like if your company built a boat? Would your customers know what to expect? Launching your first product is punishingly hard. Getting to the second one often even more so, as everything will change: Distribution, brand, product strategy, organization and psychology. Learn about the challenges of growing your product family and how to overcome them.  Georg Petschnigg, Chief Innovation Officer from WeTransfer, and co-founder of FiftyThree, the company behind the popular Paste and Paper applications, will draws from his extensive experiences building award winning products used by millions around the world. Learn how to set up your team and product strategy for success. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Logi Ana

You've probably made a bad call at some point in your career, that's ok. Today we'll talk about ways to prevent it moving forward and how to recognize and avoid the many belief, behavioral, and social biases, which flaw much human decision making, in your role as product manager. Confirmation bias, authority bias, reputation risk, survival bias and sunk-cost fallacy are rife in organizational decision making and during customer and product validation. Today we will include examples and practical tips you can use right away. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Logi Analytics, which is offering 5 free reports – from analysts like Gartner and Dresner – to help you navigate the BI landscape. Visit logianalytics.com/rocketship to claim

Often times, finding true product-market-fit can be the most difficult part of the process in launching a new product. In this talk, Rahul shares his predictable and repeatable process for finding and optimizing product-market-fit for SaaS products. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Logi Analytics, which is offering 5 free reports – from analysts like Gartner and Dresner – to help you navigate the BI landscape. Visit logianalytics.com/rocketship to claim your free reports today. This episode is brought to you by Cloudways. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that simplifies the hosting experience, Visit Cloudways.com and use the promo code RSCW to get 30% off for 3 months on Cloudways managed cloud hosting platform. Th

Positioning can make or break a new product, yet it rarely gets the attention it deserves. On todays episode, April Dunford the CEO at Ambient Strategy, outlines a product positioning process that will shine a spotlight on your product’s best features. We will also give re-positioning examples and show the impact on the overall business that resulted from that shift in context. You can check out April's book, Obviously Awesome, to dive deeper. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Cloudways. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that simplifies the hos

Marketing automation platform, Sendlane, hit a plateau in both revenue and ideas until they tried using user-centered design to unlock growth. The solution was a surprising effective one that helped to set their roadmap moving forward. Today we talk with Eric Weiss about his experience implementing user-centered design in practice and how it changed the trajectory of the business. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Cloudways. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that simplifies the hosting experience, Visit Cloudways.com and use the promo code RSCW

Catherine Ulrich, a Managing Director of FirstMark Capital, invests in a broad range of enterprise and consumer start-ups. She has a deep passion for and expertise in health and wellness, AI, and behavior change. Prior to joining FirstMark, she was the Chief Product Officer at Shutterstock (NYSE: SSTK) where she was responsible for product strategy and execution across all of Shutterstock’s offerings and brands including the company’s move into machine learning/computer vision and creative editing tools. She was also the first Chief Product Officer at Weight Watchers (NYSE: WTW), responsible for their global digital and retail experiences. Today we talk with Catherine about the six (or seven) types of Product Managers, advantages and disadvantages each face and which products they fit best leading. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free versio

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, comes in many forms. There’s the classic blog post optimization where one would write a piece of content and try to get the right combination of usefulness, keywords, and length to see if Google will rank it high enough to get discovered. but that’s not what Tommy Griffith was doing at Airbnb when he led their SEO team from 2013 - 2017. Today, we take you behind the scenes of the SEO team at Airbnb. How did they approach such a massive problem? What worked? What didn't? That and more on today's episode. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Logi Analytics, which is offering 5 free reports – from analysts like Gartner and Dresner – to help you navigate the BI landscape. Visit logianalytics.com/rock

Over the past 6 years we've had some amazing conversations with product people and entrepreneurs. Today we're going to bring you some of our favorite bits of product knowledge to help you with everything from diversity, recruiting, tough product decisions, understanding business goals and more. You'll hear from some of our favorite guests like former Facebook PM Alison Go, Jobs to be Done architect Bob Moesta, VP of Product & Strategy at Box Jeetu Patel and even Adii Pienaar. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Cloudways. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting

We explore what it really means to be a product-driven company. More than anything, it's an exercise in restraint. Don't just build because you can, or because technology allows, but because you're advancing a larger vision. Laura Roeder of Edgar shares just what that means for their company, and how it's helped them follow a guiding light to success. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Phrase. Do you have a product that you want to take to a global audience? Phrase will be your single point of truth for all of your translation projects. Go to phrase.com/roc

We are in the middle of a massive shift in the way people use and buy software. It’s been well over a decade since Salesforce brought software to the cloud. Apple put digital experiences in people’s pockets back in 2009 with the first iPhone. Blake talks about how we’re in “The End User Era” -- which is a new era that we’re now living in. We may be using applications for business purposes, but even those applications are adopted not because of some procurement manager signing a contract, but adopted from the bottom up within an organization.  “The End User Era” applies to business applications like Slack, Zoom, Calendly, and others that you probably use every day. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits

Product Marketing. The subtle art of describing your product in a way that excites everyone around you. This isn’t just for entrepreneurs pitching investors, this is for product managers and product leaders to inspire their teams to push themselves to build the best possible solution. We walk through examples from Figure One, Facebook and Sono’s with us as we attempt to break down what makes a powerful product description and what are the elements you need to improve yours. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Phrase. Do you have a product that you want to ta

Jobs to be done will change the way you think about product. It will change the way you approach user personas and influence your product decision process. It is one of the most important developments in product thinking in our time, so today we're going to dive right in. In this episode we talk with Jeetu Patel of Box, Bob Moesta co-creator of the Jobs to be done framework, Benedikt Lehnert of Wunderlist (now Microsoft) and Eric White. The theory of jobs to be done was developed in part as a complement to the theory of disruptive innovation. But disruption theory doesn’t tell you how to create products and services that customers want to buy. Jobs to be done theory does. It transforms our understanding of customer choice in a way that no amount of data ever could, because it gets at the causal driver behind a purchase. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons,

Daria Axelrod Marmer, a Product Lead at Hubspot wrote about Killing it by Killing Features and we explore that more today. It's never fun to sunset a feature we worked so hard to bring to life, but sometimes growth comes from creating focus and removing unused features to either build something new or take a new approach to solve the problem they were meant to solve. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Phrase. Do you have a product that you want to take to a global audience? Phrase will be your single point of truth for all of your translation projects. Go t

Ryan Singer and the Basecamp team have developed their own methodology for product planning. For one, they don't do waterfall or agile or scrum. For two, they don’t line walls with Post-it notes. For three, they don’t do daily stand ups, design sprints, development sprints, or anything remotely tied to a metaphor that includes being tired and worn out at the end. No backlogs, no Kanban, no velocity tracking, none of that. What they do instead is six week product builds followed by two weeks of cooling. Their leadership team decides how long they want to spend on tasks vs working with product estimates and if they work isn't done, it's thrown out. Today we sit down with Ryan Singer and learn more about his most recent book Shape Up which outlines this process. Read the full book at http://basecamp.com/shapeup. You can also join Ryan and Bob Moesta at their upcoming product seminar. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners g

Mental models are simple expressions of complex processes or relationships. These models are accumulated over time by an individual and used to make faster and better decisions. Today to explore Mental Models for Product Leadership and how to use them with your team every day. This episode is also brought to you by Airtable, which is the all-in-one platform for product managers. Rocketship listeners can receive $50 in credit by signing up at Airtable.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distrib

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill, because of our modern times, that is becoming increasingly more difficult to achieve. Today we outline some helpful practices for staying focused and achieving deeper concentration on the work that matters. This episode is also brought to you by Airtable, which is the all-in-one platform for product managers. Rocketship listeners can receive $50 in credit by signing up at Airtable.com/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. This episode is also brought to you by .tech, where you can secure your .tech domain name today. Rocketship listeners can receive a 90% discount on their .tech domain names by going to go.tech/rocketship and using coupon code ROCKETSHIP.  *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a