PM Snacks #11 / User or job stories 🤔, testing product ideas & studying competition

I'm Olivier Courtois, Head of Product @ comet & Startup Advisor. You are receiving this email because you signed up to productverse, a weekly newsletter about Product Management. Thank you for being here. If this email was forwarded to you, subscribe here

1️⃣ A Guide To Writing Effective User Stories  • Oct 2018 • 6 min read
Key highlight: user stories are meant to start a conversation with your team. They are the true "solution" experts, you should be the problem expert. Explain the why, don't be prescriptive on a solution & list clear acceptance criteria. Apart from that, I'd recommend most of the time to move beyond the regular user story templates and use for example a job story #execution

2️⃣ Product Manager Interview: Analyze a Metric Change • Aug 2020 • 10 min read
We continue the series on interviews with this third article. Highly recommended for everyone dealing with metrics (aka: all of us). Clement Kao teaches us to work in concentric circles when a metric changes in a radical way: look for mistakes in the data, look for past trends/patterns, consider inward product changes, look outside #interviewprep #data

3️⃣ Sign-Up Flows: A Friction-Based Analysis (with Examples) • Jun 2019 • 10 min read
Sign-up flows are so common that they could easily be disregarded as a tool to boost conversion & engagement at the same time. You should absolutely test how much friction your users are okay with. At comet we iterated many times on ours. When we simplified it too much for freelancers, it didn't work since it broke the promise of a selective marketplace able to match you automatically on relevant missions. On the other hand, lazy registration worked very well with our customers, that only care about the result not the tool we provide #ux #flow 

4️⃣ How To Know You Have a Successful Product Before You Build It • Sept 2020 • 6 min read
The author shares 5 ways to validate a product idea without resorting to a landing page or a kickstarter campaign. It usually says more about your marketing than the product itself, and gives a lot less insights on what to build. Instead I especially love the tactic "make a market of enthusiasts" that I advice to many entrepreneurs with a clear problem identified. It can sometimes even translate into a community driven product with some degree of network effect! #entrepreneurship #discovery

5️⃣ Alternatives, Not Competitors • Jun 2020 • 2 min read
A good reminder on what is a competitor: not your startup clone, but the many alternatives available. Slack was not competing with hipchat but with emails instead, docusign with printers & inked signatures. Any other SaaS with Google Sheet most of the time. As a result you should study the alternatives, assess how big the problem is for the users and what is the cost of change. Then, in my opinion, still look at your competitors to understand if through their features/messaging they found problems that apply to your target audience too. Don't try to copy them, just research the newly found problems, and decide on what to build #market #discovery 

See you next week!
Olivier

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