Product Collective - 📐 Testing your product

Running Product Experiments

It’s a widely held belief that product teams should experiment, so why aren’t more doing it? One reason could be that they aren’t sure how to translate the familiar perception of experiments (white lab coats and bubbling beakers) to software products. Don’t Panic. Here are some resources to explain how you can channel your inner mad scientist to test your product hypotheses.

Designing product experiments: template and examples. Teams that don’t use experiments usually think they know their product, its users, and what they should do to achieve their intended results. In contrast, teams that use experiments acknowledge they know very little about their product and users. This way of thinking presents the team with a unique opportunity to improve. Anton Rifco dives deeper into the difference between hypothesis and fact and how to use that difference to design product experiments.
(via @gopracticeio)

What to do if you can’t run experiments on your product? In recent times, AB Testing has become the gold standard for product development teams. Running experiments on the product helps teams understand the incremental effect each change has on their key metrics and gradually improve their products. However, setting up the infrastructure to run experiments efficiently is very costly. So sometimes you’ll need to find other ways to quantify the impact that a feature change has on a key metric. Kaushik Sureshkumar explores why experimentation is the best way of understanding causality and other causal inference techniques which you can use in its absence.
(via @kaushsk12)

Continues below...

On again, off again

Is Elon Musk just messing with us all?

First, he announced that he would be buying just over 9% of Twitter and, the very next day, confirmed he would be joining Twitter’s Board of Directors. Then, he declined the Board seat (because of the pesky background check they wanted to run). Then, he announced his intention to buy Twitter outright for a cool $43 Billion. Originally, there was talk of the Twitter Board of Directors instituting a “poison pill” clause in order to not accept Musk’s offer. But ultimately, Twitter did decide to accept the offer to be acquired and all was set for Elon Musk to take over the blue bird app. 

Until today.

Earlier today, Elon Musk tweeted out, “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users” – linking out to a Reuters article about spambot accounts on Twitter, sending its shares to tumble by double-digits since the close of day yesterday.

So what in the world is going on? Will this acquisition actually happen? Or is this going to play out like an entire season of Billions with the world watching, with swerve after swerve?

It’s impossible to tell how it will end. I feel for the product people at Twitter, though. We can all joke about editable tweets – but how can anybody possibly be productive when there’s so much uncertainty playing out? And it’s not like this is the first time that they’ve had to deal with leadership changes playing out publicly. 

Time will only tell. I guess we’ll all have to tune in for next week’s episode to find out what’s next.

INDUSTRY: The Product Conference is back with a bang! The in-person edition returns on September 19-21 in Cleveland, Ohio, reviving the top independent product conference anywhere. Build your network and find inspiration as you'll learn from some of the best -- like David Cancel (CEO at Drift), Sarah Butterfass (CPO at FanDuel), and even Mark Duplass (award-winning filmmaker and co-star of Apple TV's The Morning Show).

How to run a growth experiment - learn the 4 steps. Product, marketing and sales teams can learn to run growth experiments to validate new strategies in the real world before incurring significant resource investment. Howie Mann explains the 4 key steps of a growth experiment and a practical example of how you can run your own growth experiment quickly and cost effectively.
(via howie-mann)

A step-by-step guide to experimenting with product pricing. Your pricing strategy is as important as marketing or product development. The cost of your product or service can make or break its success in the market. David Campbell discusses the complex issue of product pricing and how to experiment with your pricing strategy.
(via @cannyHQ)

37 Digital tools for running business experiments: a shortlist to get started quickly. There are so many tools out there for running business experiments online. It can be a little daunting to orient yourself. To help you find your bearings, Nicholas Himowicz shared 9 experiments from Testing Business Ideas by David Bland and Alex Osterwalder, along with 37 digital tools to get you started. 
(via @strategyzer)

Breaking into the world of Product Management

Let's face it — making your way into the world of product management probably wasn't so easy. Very few of us went to school for product management — and most of us probably feel like we simply "fell into" the profession. But what if it could be easier for those breaking into product? As product people today, what can we do to play our part in helping pave the way for others? And once we've helped people find their way to our own organizations… what else can we do to help empower them?

We'll dive into all of this and more with Seth Hutcheson, Senior Product Manager at insightsoftware — with plenty of time for you to ask questions of your own as well!

This webinar is sponsored by our friends at Logi Analytics.

1. A newsletter each and every Friday centered around an important product topic, like roadmapping, strategy, and analytics.
2. Access to a thriving Slack group with thousands of others to share advice, tips and get feedback on your work.
3. Plus, invitations to exclusive video chats, special member privileges at the conferences we hold in the United States and Europe, and more!