PM #000: How To Build Digital Products
A blog for startups, corporate innovators and non-tech companies.
This blog is for everyone who wants to start out on building software a.k.a. digital products:
startup founders, entrepreneurs, innovators, corporate project managers and intrapreneurs
as well as aspiring product builders and product managers.
If you are already an experienced product manager then you might still find useful bits and pieces here, however, you will be familiar with most of the stuff presented here.
Why does this blog exist?
Despite the vast amount of available resources regarding product management, today I still wish in the past 17 years that I have been building software products I had come across this blog.
Many of the classical books will tell you about a complete product journey including a lot of anecdotal examples with little reference to the day-to-day work that happens in practice.
For instance, the legendary Crossing the Chasm or INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love are brilliant pieces of reference but unfortunately you will only learn this after the fact. They all make perfect sense in retrospect.
However, when you or your company need to implement software product management
you are not going to start by reading books
on how to scale products or first learn about the theory of building the optimal org around a product team.
The reason is you are already in the process
and you are doing it all wrong, but you might either not noticing it yet or you are already fire fighting.
Yet, you might be looking for resources, advice or hints on very specific topics related to product management, e.g.,
- Who should I hire to build the product?
- Should I outsource development or build everything in-house?
- How much thought should I spend on design, UX and UI?
- How do I prepare to go to market?
- Should we do more user research?
- What is my customer’s journey?
- What are the right KPIs to optimize for?
- What about legal and compliance?
- We won’t hire a tester — we’ll just do it without — but how?
- Can’t I just assign a project manager to tell the engineers what to build?
- How do I design a conversion funnel and is it even important?
- Should we first build the product or a brand?
- How do marketing and product management interact with each other?
- What’s the right way to get customer feedback?
- How do I prepare to launch my product?
- We’ve built web apps before — Can we now build native mobile apps?
- I’ve built and scaled B2B software before — Is B2C similar (short answer: No!)?
- How do I find my first customers?
- The more agile the better, right?
- After launch, we’ll scale the product 10X YOY, right?
- What happens after the launch?
- How do we scale the product?
- How and how much should I test before launching?
- All the agencies are working too slow — can’t I just escalate until they get up to speed?
Those and many more questions arise when you are already in the building process.
And you, your team or your org would like to get very quickly very specific answers or solutions to such challenges.
This is what this blog is about.
If you’d like to learn more, there are 3 ways I can help you:
- Subscribe to this newsletter if you want to get actionable tips on software product management.
- Email me at danielschmitter@substack.com to provide suggestions about blog topics.
- Follow or connect with me on LinkedIn here.
