The Best Thing AI Did: It Broke Product Management
From idea to deployed app in 30 minutes – this isn’t science fiction anymore. The last time I did production code was in 1996. But that may change now. This week, I built a social media advocacy reach calculator using Lovable, an AI-powered development platform. What would have traditionally taken weeks of back-and-forth with engineering, […]
The Power of Story Telling for founders and PM
A Product Leader’s Guide to Story Telling Once at an event, I stood before a room full of founders and PMs. I was going to talk about Ziply and give a demo. Instead of diving into my product or the demo, I opened with something unexpected: “I was laid off two years ago.” The room […]
Building for Experience: The Overlooked Discipline in B2B Product Management
Customer experience is a differentiator and PMs are responsible for it Recently, I was teaching a PM class and one of the questions asked was how to manage the product for an already established and mature company. I suggested looking to avenues to grow the product to adjacent areas, capabilities, markets, segments. If you are […]
The Hard Truth: Most Customer Problems Can Wait
Solve the Pain That Gets Budget, Not Just Attention Solve customer pain points. Focus on the problem. Love the problem, not your solution. Have you heard this before? Of course, our job as a PM or founder is to solve customer pain points. If you have taken courses or read books, they all start with […]
The Minimum Sellable Product
Think beyond MVP: What’s your MSP? Let’s talk product strategy. Specifically for an early startup like mine. You’ve probably heard of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and maybe even RAT (Riskiest Assumption Test). These are all about validation—finding out what to build, who to build it for, and whether they’ll pay for it. But once you […]
Should early stage founders attend conferences and summits?
A B2B founders perspective to taking advantage of conferences As an early stage B2B founder, you have countless opportunities to attend conferences, summits, and meetups. The question is: should you go to all of them, some of them, or none at all? Your time is your most valuable resource, and deciding whether to spend days […]
Find customer segments with Jobs to be done framework
As an early stage founder, how can you identify your customer segments As a founder, you are looking for your ICP, Ideal Customer Profile within a customer segment. Choosing an ICP is a daunting task and can take some time to determine in the early stages. This is even assuming you have figured out your […]
10 Essential Skills for Becoming a Better Product Manager
Beyond JIRA Tickets: What should PM learn about. I recently taught a class of about 40 students on Product Management. I usually start the first session with something like “ If you think your job is to talk to users and gather requirements and create Jira tickets, don’t call yourself a product manager”. It usually […]
Don’t hire a sales rep….yet
One of the biggest mistakes I see early-stage B2B startups make? Hiring a sales rep—or worse, outsourcing sales to an agency—before they’re ready. It’s an easy trap to fall into. Many founders see themselves as techies, not salespeople. They assume that once they have a great product, a sales rep should be able to take […]
The early stages of the startups – the ground reality
This week I posted on Linkedin announcing my new startup – Ziply. I have started slowly peeling the covers. Unlike some other founders, I don’t think I am cut out for some big splashy announcements or even openly share on Linkedin. Plus we are just starting. Here is the post. As you know, I write […]
