Product Habits - How to create products people love

How I Optimize My Time in Business

I recently sat down with James Beshara for an episode on his podcast, Below The Line. He's one of my favorite people to chat with, and I appreciate all of the thoughtful questions he asked in this interview. We cover a lot of ground about creating a remote work utopia—from the perfect at-home work setup to remote communication to how I optimize my work time. Watch the full conversation below.

The Hidden Patterns of Great Startup Ideas

We rarely hear the stories about how successful entrepreneurs initially battled to find a good idea. Company execution might be more important in later stages, but in the beginning, choosing a solid vision to build around becomes a multiplier for all of your work down the line. If you're exploring startup ideas, use these 15 frameworks to help you hone in on a great one.

Create Products People Love by Validating Your Idea First

I love early-stage startups. The possibilities are endless, and you have the potential to create something people love. But it is all too easy to waste your energy on ideas that don't matter. Here's the three-step process I use to validate ideas—it'll save you the pain of pursuing bad problems. As a complement to this framework, try invalidating your ideas, too. 

The First Year as a Chief Product Officer

Casey Winters, Eventbrite's Chief Product Officer, shares what it was like in his first year as a CPO. I appreciate his candor about what was happening with the core business, what his team had to say about it, and how he developed a brand new product strategy for the company. This is a worthwhile read if you're working on product strategy, regardless of your title. 

How SaaS Companies Should Treat Their Teams

The framework presented in this tweet is an interesting one for SaaS companies to consider. In particular, I like the idea of treating your marketing team like a media company, your product team like an R&D lab, and your leadership team like a think tank. Which of these do you agree with?

Marketing Is Harder Than Ever

Marketing is more challenging (and noisier) than ever. I'm a big believer in the importance of customer research, but early on, most startups don't have time to do hundreds of hours of research. To save time, try something called the Trigger Technique to help you come up with effective marketing ideas quickly. 

37 Tasks Every Marketer Should Automate

One of the best ways to create leverage as a marketer is to automate as many tasks as possible and streamline anything you have to do more than a few times. This detailed list serves as a good gut check to automate things beyond the obvious, like recurring webinars, dynamic CTAs, and SEO audits. 

How Coinbase Became the King Midas of Crypto

Coinbase is the most popular consumer-facing crypto exchange in the U.S. and the first in the world to go public earlier this year. I'm excited about crypto and NFTs, so I thoroughly enjoyed this detailed teardown about the company. It'll be fun to watch the company grow as the world increasingly comes around to crypto in the years to come. 

What's Underneath Productivity?

When most people think about productivity, they tend to focus on tools and organizing systems. But there is so much to glean from studying things deeper beneath the surface, like stress response and metacognition. This read will challenge you to go deeper when it comes to understanding your productivity behaviors.